We all know the Germans are excellent car makers. Perhaps they are a touch too obsessed with engineering, and in many cases, the Germans get bogged down by engineering for engineering’s sake.
An example of this is the difference between Audi, BMW and Mercedes, versus Volkswagen. Volkswagen is German engineering to a finely honed budget. Cars are pragmatically built and share a lot of parts, but often when they reach a certain age, the rigours of everyday usage (thanks to generally lower costs of entry) begin to manifest, and the cars begin suffering issues.
VWs suffer because they are built to such tight budgets, and engineers are often forced to scrimp on components to save money.
On the other hand, Audi, BMW and Mercedes make a variety of cars and are able to charge more for these due to their ‘premium’ brand perception. In many cases, these cars are more or less the same. They have the same performance, they have the same technology, and they generally cost a similar amount of money.
What this means is that the front-line models from these marques begin to develop ever so slightly different characteristics from one another, in order to appeal to different buyers. Yes, the BMW 3-Series, Audi A4 and Mercedes C-class all are very similar, but generally speaking the BMW will be the nicest to drive; the Audi will be the best in all conditions thanks to Audi’s quattro AWD system and the Mercedes will be the most outright comfortable.
At various points in the market these three brands must choose something to differentiate their cars, but as ascend their product ladders, the differences become less obvious, and there is no sector that is more obvious than each brand’s top of the line luxury saloons.
At this price point, buyers want it all. They want their car to be fast, comfortable, powerful, quiet, efficient, safe, relaxing, and more. So what do the engineers at BMW, Audi and Mercedes do? They throw the kitchen sink at these models, hoping that having more stuff, regardless of use will tempt buyers to choose their cars over their rivals.
Back to German engineering. These top-of-the-line models, are often too complicated or over-engineered (a phrase that is only every seemingly deployed for Germans, and only in a negative context), and when they begin to develop reliability issues… man, all that technology crammed into these cars makes it a bugger to work out what’s gone wrong.
These cars are quite iconoclastic, which is to say they almost seem products from a different time. Audi, BMW and Mercedes will often spend genuine fortunes developing them, and this no better illustrated than when Mercedes spent an estimated 1 billion euros developing the W140 generation Mercedes S-Class, which in turn was not 1 billion euros more advanced than the car it replaced.
The irony of these cars is that, BMW, Mercedes and Audi don’t sell that many of them. Especially now, where car buying has changed, and all three brands have chased quantity over quality offering cheaper entry level models to lure consumers in. But BMW, Audi and Mercedes are all too proud, and too stubborn to abandon the sector. They continue to pump out what are essentially white elephants because neither wants to look bad or weak in front of the others.
And for that, we love them.
Kerbside 