Regression analysis

IS IT ME OR IS THE WORLD REGRESSING, PROPELLED BY a curiously rapid decrease in human intelligence? And is this being demonstrated by the automotive industry, with manufacturers competing to see who can best design their new models to be less elegantly engineered and beautiful but more complex, big, ugly, heavy and expensive than the previous ones?

Flicking through evo 279 it would seem so, with page after page of freshly minted mediocrity and massive misshapen monstrosities: the tediously complex hugeness that is the new Golf GTI, the nauseating ghastliness of the Aston Martin Vantage Roadster’s interior, the prodigiously portly two-ton Porsche Panamonster…

It wasn’t until page 70, however, that the depths of this automotive regression were fully plumbed with the new BMW M3/4. The exterior, a combination of slabby, large-arched dull ‘Nissanity’ and the ugliest front end since the ’94 Ford Scorpio. Inside, offensively tasteless seats face off against an incoherent dash, the ‘random geometric’ theme extending to a ‘double boomerang’ rev counter. That these cars come only in 4WD and auto-gearbox form in the UK, I dare not contemplate.

Mentally bludgeoned and staggering, but hoping to survive the magazine, I vaulted the revamped Vanquish, only to be finally floored by the Fast Fleet’s inelegant and uninteresting BMW M135i xdrive. It seems there really is no escape.

James Gardiner