It’s no secret that BMW, as a brand, is one of the most powerful and well recognized in the world. Many of the Bavarian automaker’s cars are unanimously acknowledged as being among the most advanced in the world, with the decades of experience paying off in the modern era.
Proof of this is the Forbes list of the World’s Most Powerful Brands, which ranks it 9th overall and 1st among the automakers.
Sadly, BMW also equates sales figures and profits with success, and the company often strays away from their original philosophy these days, giving people what they think they want, instead of giving them what they deserve for the high premiums that a propeller-badged car attracts these days.
Even their current base model, the 1-Series, can be specified up to such a high level that you can make it more expensive than a moderately-well equipped 5-Series (find a BMW configurator of your choosing, and try it out for yourself) – that can’t be right, can it?
The German brand is followed by the names you’d expect to hear afterward, like Toyota, which is ranked 14th overall, and Mercedes-Benz which places 16th, just above Luis Vuitton. Further down (but still in order) we have Honda, Audi, VW (45th overall), Ford (59th overall), Hyundai, Nissan and Lexus in the top 100. These rankings were calculated in October of 2012, so they should remain pretty accurate today, as well.
By Andrei Nedelea
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