BMW's new ad campaign

An interesting thread from the BMW-SG forums:

http://www.bmw-sg.com/forums/bmw-singapore-motoring-life/9360-bmw-slams-competitors-new-ad-campaign.html

Courtesy of BMW AG
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NO. The ability to say no to compromise is a rare thing these days. Many companies would like to be able to say it, but so few have the autonomy to actually do it. As an independent company, BMW can say no. No, we will not compromise our ideas. No, we will not do it the way everyone else does it. No, we will not factor designs down to the lowest common denominator. No, we will not sell out to a parent company who will meddle in our affairs and ask us to subject our cars to mass market vanilla-ism. Because we can say no to compromise, we can say yes to other things - such as building our vehicles with 50/50 weight distribution for superior handling and control, despite the fact that it costs more to build them that way. It's thousands of little things like this that separate BMW from other car companies. By maintaining our autonomy and ability to say no, we can make sure great ideas live on to become ultimate driving machines.

My comments, and also mirroring comments from follow-up posts in the same thread:

1) Electric power steering - compromise steering feel in favour of petrol consumption

2) Active Steering (actually, invented by Toyota in Land Cruiser WAAAAY back before BMW's Active steering) - compromise is to make it easy to park at the expense of steering feel and predictability

3) Run-flat tyres - sacrifice ride and feel in favour of cost savings and to make a bigger boot?

I don't mind a company making rational compromises, in fact, all industry is based on compromises, but when a company makes compromises and then advertises that it is uncompromising, that's a little weird to me. And worse, if one claims that it resisted all compromises to make a car with 50-50 chassis balance, and yet this 50-50 chassis balance is of questionable value as supergreenhorn mentioned, then ... it's very very borderline vulgar marketing.

Here's more on 50-50 chassis balance:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/greglocock/5050.htm

clearly the best weight distribution for lateral acceleration is somewhere between 50 and 60%.

An interesting comment on the actual vote share of the Singapore Parliamentary Elections

Q4 is a poster I really don't know much about, but his insights (to somebody who doesn't really care - me) are pretty spot-on.

In a comment about the official vote-share of the PAP in the 2006 Singapore Elections - 66.6% - an interesting point to note is that the 66.6% of the popular vote was alread relatively low, but taking into consideration the Singapore Democratic Party putting weak candidates into the polls and losing terribly, he thinks it is not really the true percentage.

The percentage will even be lower if the votes cast in consitituencies which the SDP contested in were excluded. And this is pretty good insight.