So true, and "Like".

 

Don't forget the maintenance costs of a BMW if you plan on keeping the car long term...

Just my .02 and why I chose Infiniti over BMW.

 

Well this is for every single model. This all depends on how you treat your car in the long run. I have seen people buy a honda civic which are tested to last about 200k before having any real problems fall apart after 60k. Why? Cause they don't do their car maintenance. They don't get their oil changes done at the right time.

Same goes for Infiniti, Lexus, BMW, Audi, Acura, whatever brand name you want to put on there. Do your routine maintenance and you will be fine.

 

Quick question, my warranty is dead since last month and I'd like to do the routine maintenance on my G. Should I visit a Infiniti dealer shop or a local auto shop? Should I follow the maintenance check on the manual or request them to do a basic inspection on my car and fix/update whateva it is broken? Just wondering.

 

Well oil change is very simple. Probably about 50 bucks out of your pocket. I never take my car to the stealership unless it was warranty work.

To do a lot of the services like rear diff oil change, gear oil change if you drive a manual is very very very easy. It's like an oil change. Yea I normally just follow the maintenance guide and do them myself. I call the dealership a stealership for a reason. Also, almost every single D.I.Y is posted on the forums. From change oils to change out clutches. I learned a lot from the forums and by following the instructions on the D.I.Y.

 

Ugh, this right here. I've spent way too much money modding my car because I only pay for parts and materials and not labor because this damn forum is too informative. I keep telling myself "it's ok, it's a good deal because I don't have to pay for labor." this forum is gonna be the end of me.

 

Yep shop labor will rape you in the azz most of the time.

 

I looked at the 335 vs. the G37. I’m a car nut, have now owned 103 cars in the past 37 years of driving. I’m brand agnostic, have no loyalty to any particular one. I have restored, raced, and worked on many cars, and look at them from perspectives that most people don't (I also tend to be a perfectionist, and want reliability and fair value as well as being fun to drive). I have owned a couple of BMW's, and looked long and hard at the 335, but got the feeling it might not be as much fun to own as it is to drive.

The 335 is a blast to drive, as are most BMW’s. It is a great combination of performance and luxury. The company should also be applauded for offering manual transmissions in many of their models at a time when most companies don’t. However, BMW has also done a fantastic job of marketing itself over the past 20 years. Where do you think the whole “ultimate driving machine” mantra came from? BMW itself, with brilliant, persistent marketing. The company has set standards for skillful product placement. So many movies and television shows over the past two decades have BMW’s in them whenever “upscale, affluent” lifestyles or “beautiful people” are depicted. BMW itself now touts the “BMW lifestyle” in their marketing. Their efforts have been phenomenally successful. Most people think “BMW” when they think “upscale” car, or “upscale” lifestyle. Just like the cigarette advertising of the second half of this century, a whole generation – us – now has BMW successfully branded on our psyches as the “it” car to have. Most people that are – or want to be – “upscale” want to have a BMW.

For many years BMW richly deserved that reputation. The 2002, which started the whole legend, was a fun to drive, beautifully engineered, reliable, reasonably priced car. Unfortunately (also IMHO), BMW’s today are morphing into a different animal. After 20 years of aggressive marketing, BMW now seems to be more focused on maximizing profits.

If you take a close, critical, objective look at the 3 series, it is apparent that the company has gone through it with a fine toothed comb looking for ways to cut costs. I know people in the car business, and they admit that they look at everything and ask, “will people still buy it for the same price if we do this”? Flimsy windshield wipers. Some interior control ***** that would shame a Hyundai. No spare tire (saves $50, and most people will still buy it and pay the same price as if it had one). No limited slip differential, which is shameful in any car with sporting pretensions. It doesn’t even have an oil dipstick, and for me personally, there is just no way on Earth I would ever buy a car without a dipstick.

The Z3 Roadster is another example of cost-cutting (I had one of those, a 1999). Looks great, fun to drive, the M Roadster was a modern day Cobra. But, BMW cut corners on the structural integrity of the unibody, and after a few years, the rear ends were literally coming apart from the floor pan! Unbelievable in a modern car! There was some sort of class action lawsuit about it, and they made a ‘patch kit’ to weld in additional panels to keep the rear ends attached. Save $5 here and $10 there, the next thing you know, it’s $1,000 more profit per unit, an impressive accomplishment in the razor-thin margins of the automobile industry.

More worrisome was the overheating problem with the 335, which suggested some serious thermal management issues. Road & Track experienced an engine overcooking its oil and going into limp mode after a few gentle laps on a track. Then, all sorts of reports of engines grenading themselves start showing up on the BMW forums. BMW seems to have cut the corner too closely on this one, and it’s not going to be solved just by adding an oil cooler. The engine is maxed out, stressed to its limits to squeeze out as much power as it is generating from its displacement. Impressive from an efficiency perspective, but worrisome for longevity and reliability.

The 335 seems to have been designed to make owners dependent on the dealer, and addicted to expensive – and not easily substituted – maintenance. To wit: composite brake rotors, which cannot be turned and must be replaced at every brake job (20,000 miles or so), to the tune of $740. Those windshield wipers which you can’t get anywhere else? $48. I got quotes for oil changes from two dealers: $130 and $200. For an oil change!

BMW’s brilliant marketing also promotes “free maintenance”. Which, of course, it isn’t – the cost is simply built into the price up-front. The “free” maintenance also gets you oil changes every 15,000 miles (= 3 oil changes during the warranty period). BMW cannot repeal the laws of physics and metallurgy. While synthetic oils certainly last longer than conventional, this is partially offset by the higher operating temperatures that are used to extract better efficiency – and as a result, shorten oil life. This is especially true in a turbo engine like the 335 (turbos actually get red hot in operation). After 5,000-7,000 miles of this kind of thermal stress, even the best synthetic oil is going to have its shear properties significantly degraded. The number of early engine failures is already showing that thermal management is a problem – and oil temps and lubricating properties are critically important. Bottom line, 15,000 mile oil changes will get almost any engine through the warranty period without any problems, but I would hate to see what the bearings look like after 100,000 miles – or own the engine once it’s out of warranty. Some people have commented that they see the 335 as a “lease and return”, one to have fun with but that you wouldn’t want to own once the warranty has expired.

Which is the culmination of BMW’s shrewd marketing: lease their cars, and once the warranty and lease are up, lease a new one. Like a smart drug dealer, get the customer hooked, and then keep them addicted and regularly coming back for more. It is a classic, brilliant business strategy to move a product from a periodic capital purchase (buy a car every several years) to a continuous income stream (lease payments for life). It maximizes and stabilizes the company’s cash flow. I take my hat off to BMW for figuring out how to do this. If I worked for them I would try to do the same thing.

But I don’t. I am a consumer. I don’t like flushing my money down the toilet unnecessarily (well, at least not too much….). I know it’s one of my own pet peeves, but I don’t like being led down the garden path to help line someone else’s pockets. Even the maintenance costs have become a secondary message of BMW’s marketing – the cost of the “BMW lifestyle”. Some people defend BMW’s lack of reliability by saying “you own a BMW for the drive, not the reliability”, and “you shouldn’t buy a BMW if you want a reliable car” – also straight out of BMW marketing. If you built a car that was more expensive but less reliable than the competition, what else would you say to keep the addicts coming back?

There have been many comparisons between the 335 with the G37. IMHO, the performance of the G37 is not significantly different from the 335. The performance specs seem to be within a few tenths of a second of each other, well within the range of car-to-car variability and driver skill. A $1000 driving class would no doubt make a bigger difference in who would be faster around a track. What the G37 does seem to have, IMHO, is more robust construction quality, and more straightforward maintenance – for thousands of dollars less. BMW built some great cars in the past – the E46 series M3 was a jewel, and a terror on the track. But, IMHO, Infiniti is the truer successor than the 335 to the BMW legend started by the 2002: a solid, straightforward, reliable, comfortable, high-performance car at a more reasonable price.

A lot of people consider it sacrilege for me to not unquestioningly worship at the altar of BMW. Some people on other forums post less than fanatically religious comments on the 335, and the fanboys are ready to tear them a new one. But, we’re are all just expressing our opinions, we’re just talking about cars. Post-purchase cognitive dissonance is a classic human emotional response (that I too am often guilty of): rationalize and justify a decision after the fact, even if it means ignoring objective data.

But, like the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, just because most people think something, doesn’t mean it’s true. A lot of people think BMW’s are the ‘ultimate’, but it doesn’t mean that’s true either. But that’s just my opinion, and also why I’m now on my third G Coupe – started with a 2004 G35 Coupe, then had a 2008 G37 6MT, and now just bought a 2012 Coupe 6 MT Sport.

 

The BMW has a refinement the g lacks. The bmws are street cars not track cars And thus I can live without an LSD. I love my g, but in a few years if Infiniti does not have a worthy successor to the g37, back to BMW. Yep, their marketing is amazing, but so are there cars.

They must have snookered the world to be number 1 in sales in this segment for so long. Lots of dumb consumers out there.

And let's not forget the g is expensive out of warranty as well. And look at all the tranny threads.

 

@Nick-L:
What a write up! I hardly read post that's longer than a couple paragraphs, but I couldn't get enough of yours.

 

I....think....you are overstating G problems a bit. This place (and most japanese car forums in general) are pretty tame compared to Bimmer/Audi forums.

In the end, if you want a BMW, get a BMW, but for the rest of us, Infiniti simply gives us more car for our buck, especially those of us that are buying a car to keep instead of leasing.

 

If you compare to a Bimmer, it's NOT.

 

The g has its share of issues. While the tranny won't leave you stranded, people say it renders the car undriveable. I didn't overstate anything, there are multiple threads on multiple forums about this.

There is also way more 3 series sold over the years than Gs. It's no coincidence more cars more issues. Tough to judge the extent of real issues from an Internet forum.

I won't argue the g is a better value, but I think the 3 is a better sports sedan. I was nervous about buying my first Infiniti btw.

 

Nicely said but one thing I disagree is with the performance. It cost way less to mod a 335i and make it way faster than an m3,m5,m6 then it would cost our G. It is probably due to it not having a turbo charger in it. I to have drove a lot of cars around the track and I gotta tell you I seen countless cars, m3,m5, s5, s4, SLS all go into limp mode because it was over heating. It is a very common issue for almost every brand but I gotta say out all the cars it was the g's and 335's that I've seen go into limp mode the most.

I also agree with you on the free maintenance part great great great marketing tool for bmw and I say about 70% of people who buy a BMW (matter of fact any model) do not know much about cars. Hence why I tell people if you keep your maintained throughout the years everything will be fine.

P.S once again great write up.

 

Actually while the writing was good, it was a very slanted view of BMW.

Where the poster mentions "BMW Lifestyle" as a brilliant marketing ploy, right on Infinitis website under merchandise, it says exactly the same thing: "Infiniti Lifestyle".

All car companies are guilty of the same stuff, except BMW put it's money where it's mouth is and delivers the goods.