Hey! My Car's Better Than Yours!
My BMW M3's better than your Audi RS5. That's because although your Audi is faster, and it has looks good enough to turn on a five-year-old, and has the same desirability and feelgood factor as all other premium Audis, and has a 4WD system good enough to make handling a piece of cake, it just doesn't have the steering 'feel' that my car has. And you can't go sideways either. Boo.
Oh, and did I mention that my 458 Italia is better than your McLaren MP4-12C? That's because your McLaren is so perfect, ad it does everything so perfectly, that it just doesn't have the 'character' (read characteristic weaknesses) that define the personality of a supercar. My Ferrari, on the other hand, is laughably overt, extreme and noisy. So much so, that it commands the respect of the driver, who has to tame these quirks. And therefore, my car has charm that your car doesn't. (Let me conveniently ignore at this point the fact that any car lesser than a Ferrari with the same amount of engine noise will be damned to hell because of it.)
Such is the insight into how the mind of the automotive journalist works. Most cars driven and reviewed by these lucky people are rated on the basis of abstract terms like 'steering feel' et al. And for whom? Us, the common people, will never really care much about whether our nice, fast Bimmer can give us proper feedback on the turns. Heck, we ain't gonna drive fast on turns anyway. Nor are we going to drift our beautiful cars: cops don't allow it, and we wouldn't risk the tiny scratch from kicked-up stones or the impound. Not on our lives.
What's more, rumor has it that the age of the average Jaguar owner is 55. Heck, the rumors even say that the age of the average Zonda owner is 70 (although I'd happily like to be corrected on that one). I can't imagine myself thrashing my supercar, no matter how fast, at the age of seventy when climbing the stairs wastes me enough already.
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