This review feature was first published in the Daily Nation’s Car Clinic.
Let us take a hard look at Subarus and BMWs. To begin with, the naturally aspirated Impreza was nothing to write about, the turbocharged one was tied in with all manner of social ills. The NA Legacy performed like someone with a plastic bag over his head trying to run a marathon (breathless), and the turbo Legacy was unreliable.
The only passable car was the Forester, particularly the SG9 STi which I still lust after — but will settle for a comely SG5 Cross Sport Turbo — but then again, there were issues with rear leg room and oxygen sensors and cylinder heads, particularly with the early SF models.
Past cars were interesting too: the Brat was… unusual, for lack of a better description. The Leone was the result of drug abuse, because who in their right mind puts the spare wheel in the bonnet next to the engine and… and… this is hilarious… and hooks the handbrake to the front wheels? The Tribeca was as pointless as the BMW X6: untalented, oversize, overweight, thirsty, weird to look at and bought strictly by those who wanted to seem to stand out.
Speaking of X6, this is the one car that single-handedly introduced suspicion to our minds that BMW may either be losing the plot or gaining too much confidence in itself to the point of feeding manure to the people.
We were initially skeptical during the Chris Bangle era, but the E60 5 Series (particularly the M5), though odd, was the yardstick at which other manufacturers would look and shout at their R&D teams: “This is where we want to be in the next 45 years!” It was as wonderful as it was awkward-looking. The X6, however, has no redeeming features.
Before we continue with this disquisition, let us again get one more thing out of the way. Subarus are not all bad. Some are lovable.
The Impreza STi is a pepperoni pizza on wheels: it is not wholesome, it is not satisfying, it will burn if not taken with just a smidgen of care, it may be bad for your health, but it is a good machine just like the Forester STi. In the same vein, once the reliability issues with the Legacy are sorted (get rid of the twin-turbo engine), what you end up with is one of the best all-round cars ever. In other words, the only good Subaru is one with a turbo. One turbo. The more compact the car, the better. No better manifestation of this exists.
Now, BMWs. The 3 Series is cool. The 5 Series is buyable. The X5 is the ideal town and semi-marsh runabout you want; not too hardcore to make the owner look silly dropping off his children at a school linked by a tarmac road; and also not too inept as to get stuck in three inches of water. The 7 Series is less cliché than the S Class as the choice of transport for the emerging bourgeoisie, and is infinitely cleverer and sprightlier than the Merc equivalents, bar the AMGs.
The rest need to be killed with fire, and this is where the problem comes. BMW makes the best engines in the world, and they know it. They also give too much leeway to their creative types, the results of which are the X6 (what if we made an SUV that looks like a sports car?
The Range Stormer* concept looks awesome but we can out-awesome it!) and the BMW 1 Series** (what if we robbed all the interior space of a small hatchback by making it rear-wheel drive? Drivers love rear-wheel drive!).
We now have a 2 Series, 4 Series, 6 Series but sadly no more 8 Series, which was a car that gave the Mercedes Benz SL and Jaguar XJS/early XK plenty of headaches. The result is BMW almost got away with selling atrocities such as the E60 5 Series GT, a four-wheeled abomination that thankfully died out as quickly as the Germans who made it drove on the autobahn. It also gave us motoring hacks an insight into the mind of a BMW driver.
The most demeaning terminology used out there to describe these people is “badge-whore” (yes, search the Internet, you will find it). These are people who will buy a BMW no matter what. Small BMWs are bought by unthinking automatons; up-and-coming young urban professionals — yuppies — with too much confidence and too little courtesy; the two traits necessary for survival in the punitively competitive corporate world in which they roam; and they extend this overconfidence and lack of civility onto the road.
Subaru? Not so much the car as it is the driver. The cheapest bang-per-buck cannot be found anywhere short of an Impreza STi. All manner of drivers own and drive STis, from the crash-prone youths still cutting their teeth on snap-shifting techniques (don’t use strength, finesse is key to rapid-fire gear changes) to established rally drivers who can tell exactly what they want from a car (an STi makes for a more relaxing daily driver compared to an Evo); the helmsman lineup runs the whole gamut.