Stuttgart, Munich, Ingolstadt – three cities, three ideologies and three brilliant cars. The problem with BSM is that we can have only one winner, so we decided to go... hill climbing!
Preface
These cars are the equivalent of chocolate mousse – you just cannot go wrong with them. They are German cars and that means they are not made of cardboard, they are not as long and wide as aircraft carriers (that means they can be driven on our roads) and they are not that small to question the rung you have reached in the social ladder. The E, the 5 and the A6 – to me any of these could be the best all-round machines this side of the International Space Station. They have puny engined variants, they have strong diesels as in this case and, yes, they can come with terrifying prefixes such as AMG, M and RS that can really rock the spaceship. And they normally have four doors and even cup holders, and you don’t need to postpone the acquisition of a loss making company with hidden potential, to buy one. They are real world cars meant to be driven and not polished and garaged. Hundred years from now, if you have to choose one car to represent the state of automotive affairs in 2007, then you would choose one of these (no, the Toyota Prius will be considered a terrible joke by then – the same way we look at early steamers today).
For this anniversary special, we collected three diesels. Though Audi sells the 2.7 and 3 litre versions of the A6, they sent the more powerful car for the test. Sensible indeed. BMW builds only the 525d, which features the same inline six that powers the 530d albeit with less horsepower. Hmm, we really wondered what it could do. Mercedes-Benz makes only the E 280 diesel available for its customers. All these motors displace around 3000cc, with the Mercedes and BMW making 190 and 194 bhp to propel the rear wheels while the Audi belts out a whopping 233 bhp to four wheels. Unfair comparison? Not really. There are much more to these cars than numbers, since each car maker has tried very hard to give them an overdose of their engineering gene and design flair. So much so that they are spectacularly different cars – to look at, sit in and to drive.
Why and how of the BSM HC-T (Hill Climb Test)
Welcome to an all-new form of road testing. The BSM HC-T will now be part of our test schedule for cars along with the established Performance Evaluation Track tests. It may sound like one, but the BSM Hill Climb Test for comparing cars is not exactly an out-and-out performance test. Sure, we mapped the terrain and satellite-tracked the cars so that we could analyse the data, but the idea was to compare the three cars for pace, grace and poise as well.
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