The newspapers are today full of information about a survey conducted by Auto Trader confirming that BMW drivers are the worst on the road. From 21,000 of their readers surveyed, 46 per cent thought that BMW drivers were worst. No news there then. People have complained about BMW drivers for years. To my mind, probably more interesting is that 23 per cent believed that Subaru drivers were the worst and 18 per cent believed that Porsche drivers were the worst.
Now, this is where I start to take issue with the findings because if there’s one thing for sure, BMW sells far more cars than Subaru and Porsche. So, by the law of probability, you’re far more likely to see a ‘bad’ BMW driver than either of the other two. Therefore, to give a true reflection of who is really the worst driver, I think it’s only fair if the figures are sales-volume weighted. In this way, we can compare apples with apples.
In 2007, BMW sold 121,575 cars. In that same period, Subaru sold 6,051 cars and Porsche 8,533. On this basis, you are 20 times more likely to see a ‘bad’ BMW driver as opposed to a ‘bad’ Subaru driver and nearly 15 times more likely to see a ‘bad’ BMW driver as opposed to a ‘bad’ Porsche driver.
Clearly I’m not suggesting that every BMW is driven by halo-endowed occupants but using this slightly more level playing field, I’d suggest that if your looking to point fingers at a certain car brand and its drivers, there are far worse culprits than the usual suspect.
And on a completely different subject, thank you to Mr Darling for pulling back from the additional 2p per litre fuel duty that was due to be levied in October. However, quite how he’s going to cope with only 50p in every litre that each and every motorist puts in their fuel tank is beyond me!!
