If you have observed that many BMW drivers are very aggressive and seem to lack courtesy for other drivers, then you are not alone, according to this recent study:
Interesting that they have the worst loss record. BMW drivers also believe they are MUCH BETTER DRIVERS than the rest of us! My wife believes they buy those cars because it is the only brand whose name they can spell!
Back in the '80s, when BMWs parked in urban areas were frequently broken into in order to steal their high-end radios, it was said that BMW actually stood for, “Break My Window”.
;-))
In the DC/Baltimore area, BMW is just one of the many discourteous car - and truck - brands.
Unfortunately, this study doesn’t address the question of whether people who drive like jerks are more likely to drive BMWs or it’s the experience of driving a BMW that somehow makes someone drive like a jerk. Someone should commission a study where they loan BMWs to people who can’t afford to buy BMWs for themselves. At the same time, they could take some BMW owners and loan them under-powered economy cars to see if they change the way they drive. My hunch is that if they loaned BMWs to people who can’t afford them, they’d drive them carefully, and the BMW owners would weave in and out of traffic in their loaner economy cars. I believe aggressive drivers are simply more likely to buy BMWs.
I think BMW itself may be too blame
“The Ultimate Driving Machine” of course some hotheads will want to see if it’s true
LOL
I call this “German Car Syndrome”. A lot of WV drivers are afflicted with it, too. I think the VW drivers are trying to get to their destination before something goes wrong with the car.
“A lot of VW drivers are afflicted with it, too.”
Indeed they are.
A few weeks ago, while I was driving at my usual 5 mph over the speed limit on one of our local deer-infested roads, a VW Jetta began tailgating me very closely. Then, he passed me on a curve, in a no-passing zone. When I got to my destination, I discovered that the same Jetta was already parked there, although the driver was not present. I also noted that there was a small child in a car seat in the back of this car.
I waited until the driver returned, and informed him that he drove like an absolute a-hole, especially in view of presence of the young child in the car. His response, was, “So I guess you never passed anyone in your life”. He was apparently unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to see the difference between the act of passing another car, and the act of passing another car on a curve, in a no-passing zone.
Yes, I have encountered many VW drivers who are as aggressive as BMW drivers.
The sad thing is that many of my colleagues, who, like me, all have CDLs to protect, also drive like that guy in your story
The scary thing is that they sometimes drive like that in our fleet trucks, which are very tall, heavy, and take longer to stop.
How would Manolito or twotone respond to your diatribes against people of their ilk?
“How would Manolito or twotone respond to your diatribes against people of their ilk?”
I have several questions
Who was your last response meant for?
What is a diatribe?
Who is twotone?
You can count me as one more person who is…puzzled…by jtsanders’ post.
Yes, I know what a diatribe is, but…to whom was this directed?
Manolito and twotone are longtime BMW owners.
Don’t you think this whole thread is way off base in the generalizations it makes about a class of car owners - and connections to their personal courtesy behavior, their driving habits, and support of a blog in bankrate.com written by one of it’s authors?
It’s author, Claes Bell, is a freelance finance writer, who make his fame at Bankrate by increasing their presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Is he writing articles like this because they’re grounded in fact, or because he has to write something to sustain internet presence?
Yeah, @JoeMario, some stories like this one are what I like to call “click bait.” Their main purpose isn’t necessarily to inform the readers. Their likely purpose is to increase traffic to their website to they can charge more for advertising.
I’m sure not every German car driver drives like a jerk. There are plenty of German car owners who drive like sane people. However, if someone is driving like a jerk, the odds are fairly reasonable that the driver is behind the wheel of a German car.
A friend of mine recently lamented that she sees a lot of people driving aggressively in their Ford Fusions. Coincidentally, after hearing that story, on the way home, I spotted a Ford Fusion that had been in a massive wreck and was being pulled up onto the bed of a tow truck.
The damage was in the front.
Interestingly, the people who ride BMW motorcycles do not seem to have the bad name that the car drivers do, or so it seems to me.
I had an interesting experience with a BMW owner back in 1970 when I was a graduate student living in married student housing at a Big 10 university. New faculty were allowed to live in these married student apartments for two years while they searched for permanent housing. There was a new faculty in chemistry who lived in our apartment complex and owned a BMW. If it rained, he had to dry off the ignition system before the BMW would start. One day when it was raining particularly hard, my wife and I came out to our 1965 Rambler to go to our respective assistantship duties on campus. The BMW owner was trying to dry out the ignition system while his wife was yelling at him from inside the car about being late. I offered them a ride down to the main part of campus which they accepted. I dropped off my wife at her building, his wife at her building where she served as a secretary and then proceeded to take the chemistry professor to his building. This professor described to me how great a BMW was and how poorly engineered my Rambler was by comparison. I finally had enough and said, “No matter how cold it gets, this car always starts. I pulled a loaded U-Haul trailer down here in 90 plus weather and the engine didn’t overheat. That’s what I call engineering”. The chemistry prof then said to me, “You wouldn’t appreciate a fine car”. “No”, I replied, “but I sure hate to walk in the rain”. He didn’t say another word, but when he got out of the car, he slammed the door so hard I thought he was going to break the glass. The next time it rained and he was frantically trying to dry out the ignition system to start his BMW, my wife and I got in our Rambler, fired it up and took off. I honked and waved to him as we went past.
I was not a chemistry major. My own advisor was a known research professor in statistics. He had a VW 1500 notchback that I think he had brought from Germany. It was really beat up–it made Columbo’s Peugot look like the finest car ever made.
So, unless somebody backed into that Ford Fusion at extreme speed . . .
BTW . . . I have had somebody back up into my car. This happened in a parking lot, and the lady in front of me decided to back up . . . into my front bumper. She admitted her fault, had really good insurance, and everything was handled quite well.