BMW benefits from confused 1-series owners
Luca Ciferri is a reporter for Automotive News
Believe it or not, 80 percent of BMW 1-series owners believe they are driving a front-wheel-drive car.
Given that today is March 22, I promise this is not an early April Fools’ Day joke.
BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer shared the mind-boggling statistic during a call with analysts following the release of the company’s 2009 financial results.
Says the brand that has always saId RWD is the only way yet is going down the FWD route with it’s new 1 series and new city car. Bit of spin do you think ?
I think that says more about the owners of BMW’s than BMW themselves !
Other way around lol…do they actually have a nice looking car currently in production!
Other way around lol…do they actually have a nice looking car currently in production! [/quote]
z4 and m3 look good to me.
The S3 is going to be front wheel drive too. 
I have a friend that knew the original designer of the 1 series and it was planned to be an MG and front wheel drive, I only found this out after telling him the pedal offset in a 1 series is the worst I have ever sat in 
Would have been a real MG then 
Having driven a few left hand drive German Manufacturerd cars I have to say they are typically more comfortable than their RHD versions …
Yes and No.
The plan for the Rover 400 replacement went through a number of different platform layouts. The 1-series was based off one of those concepts, but that layout was superceded with another one before BMW sold off Rover IIRC.
We were most of the way through the mule vehicle build for that concept which was a longitudinal engine FWD vehicle when that design was scrapped (it was based on an E34 4WD 5-series estate with the RWD bit disconnected and the rear overhang cut off).
BMW built a FWD (and 4WD) 3-series compact years earlier, it was a bizarre thing with a AC-Schnitzer wide body kit on it and a 1.6 K-series engine and Rover front suspension, all before BMW bought Rover. I drove it briefly and it was okay but nothing special as TBH they didn’t really understand FWD properly. It was part of a study they did and they concluded that the would stick with RWD and the occasional 4WD car.
Not overly surprised they are looking at FWD nowadays as they learned quite a bit from Rover on the new Mini and their version (mk2) seems pretty good.