2021 BMW Z4 - Why buy a luxury brand?

That’s even more of a reason to buy a luxury car we can’t afford.

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Seeing someone drive a shiny new luxury car doesn’t impress me the least bit. What does impress me is when I see someone driving a very old car that looks to be in excellent condition. Especially if it’s a model which was never considered “valuable” or “collectible”.

For example, last Friday while I was driving in my work truck, I saw a lady driving a near-mint Ford Festiva with “historic vehicle” license plates. A few months ago, I saw an old man driving a near-mint Pontiac Sunbird sedan. Seeing something like this always turns my head, a new BMW not so much.

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Last autumn, I was driving for a short time next to a woman and her '52 or '53 Kaiser Manhattan.
It hadn’t been restored, but it looked pretty darn good, and she was keeping up with traffic very nicely.
I was impressed.

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There is something very cool about that car. Very rare, not a physically large as so many 50’s cars and that dip in the beltline trim on the rear doors.

A guy made a custom resto-mod coupe out of one of those.

I thought the 1954 Kaiser was one of the best looking cars of 1954. Had Kaiser developed a modern V8 engine instead of spending the money on bringing out the Henry J, Kaisers might have been more popular. Kaiser did offer an optional supercharger for its flathead 226 cubic inch inline 6, but it still wasn’t very powerful.
I always thought the Kaisers and Studebakers of the mid 1950s had better styling than the luxury makes.

+1 to all of Triedaq’s comments.
Additionally, those Kaisers handled better, and rode better, than other cars of that era.

I own a 2012 BMW 528i Xdrive. My neighbor owns a 2019 BMW 528i Xdrive. There are only two differences between his and my BMW. The rear camera view is a little different and his is blue, mine is silver. Oh yes, and he paid a whole lot more for his.

Three is very little imagination and creativity that BMW designers have. It is almost impossible to differentiate model years just by looking at models from the last 10 years.

This said, I very much enjoy driving this thing. An awful smooth ride. It’s like this 4 cylinder is hugging the road and won’t let go. I am not impressed with the run-flat tires. Changing to regular tires means lugging a spare around in your trunk and that takes space away.

I purchased mine used with 80K miles from an Audi dealer and they gave me a 12k miles bumper to bumper warranty. That actually was an important factor for me to buy this car. It also mattered to me that it came from an Audi dealer. The previous owner upgraded to an outrageously expensive Audi.

Don’t worry about re-sale value. They don’t have any… :slight_smile:

I know that I sound like (am) a car snob, but when I was buying my wife’s second BMW, which was a fully optioned 2004 330i that was three years old at the time, my teen-aged daughter asked me why I would pay that much for a three year-old car when I could buy a brand new fully optioned Honda or Toyota for that money. I said “A brand new Honda or Toyota will be brand new for only a month or so, but a BMW will ALWAYS be a BMW.” We have owned five BMW 3-series cars that we bought as they came off leases for half what they sold for new. One went 335k miles and still looked and ran great when we sold it. My daily driver currently has 249k miles on it and it runs and looks great other than some stitching is failing in the leather seats.

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Yes I agree with you:

Frankly a brand new Honda or Toyota will ALWAYS be a Honda or Toyota too :wink:

Anyone who appreciates and enjoys the capabilities of a BMW or Audi, that’s great. The OP didn’t seem to fit in that category.

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Back in the '80s, I knew a guy who bought a 3-series BMW because it was the “in thing” to do in the crowd with which he associated. He drove like somebody’s Grandmother, so the car’s performance abilities were totally lost on him.

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