Maxima is the reigning king of the rental fleet. They can charge for a “full-size” with it even though the Altima is bigger. This is what leaning on fleet sales does. 

I’d put it another way: Go back to simplicity. BMW reliability has become trash and we all know it. Part of why Lexus has walks all over BMW in depreciation is that they don’t fall apart after 60k miles. So what you said AND.........

I see your point, but can’t help but feel 90% of this problem would be fixed by just bringing back some sweet, sweet sidewall.

Have you seen the new “Guppy Edition” Camaro yet? That’s some crazy DRL right there. 

As a two decade BMW enthusiast I’ll be the proper Jalop die hard here and say this is them cashing in on their 80's & 90's rep finally drying up. Their reputation for quality, fun, tossable cars has been traded away to sell yetanother grocery hauler to Mary P. MacBoring in order to keep pushing that profitability.…

They’re just going to raid the GM catalog and brand engineer the USDM while they stop making cars & sedans for it. Guaranteed. They’ll still make some in China for that market but I promise you Buick is the next brand going all SUV/CUV here.

So beautiful.....

What year or decade do you think we’ll finally look back on these inflated consumptrucks with the proper amount of derision and hate? 2025? 2040?

I clearly remember watching this live at friends house. Was what seemed like a full minute of stunned silence. I’m sure it was less but man what a moment. 

Was about to post this and gripe about it’s absence. Single handedly changed my mind and made me want a C3.

*nods in art gallery*

I imagine if your goal were to cross a continent rather than attack an apex, this would still be a top ten contender.

I’m not recommending it but my go to is......

See, again, that’s my point.

I cannot speak for the global market, but the attitude toward their products will likely only suffer here in the US. Nobody who’s complained of FCA quality has said “You know what they need? The French and Nissan!”.

Counterpoint: Male ducks are serial rapists with barbed, corkscrew shaped wangs. Haven’t been able to get happy about mallards since finding that out and NEITHER WILL YOU!

Yes, but my point is this will also cause them to over-correct. They’ll chase the cars with better sales numbers irrelevant of what the market actually wants because there’s no correction for minority buyers choice. Of course you’re never going to see manuals in the 40-60% range again, but dealers seeing it at 10%…

It’s anecdotal but not true here. Hell I’ve wanted to try the Accord 2.0 manual for a long time and every damn time my local dealer get’s one it’s sold before I even get there. What’s funny is the 1.5's do sit longer, implying to me the dealer is still (wrongly) trying to play the “manual as a stripper model” card and…

Frankly this supports my hypothesis: Dealers are a main driver of the manual apocalypse. The feedback loop of:

Any word on an SI hatch? And related is closing the UK hatch factory going to kill the hatch completely?