BMW UK's then managing director stood with his back to me, staring out of his office window, hands clenched behind his back (a pose he often seemed to adopt when talking to people). "BMW will never," he said, with Churchillian intonations, "go beyond a 1% share of the UK market. It would remove our exclusivity and appeal."
Well that was then, and this is now, with BMW currently on 4.45% of the UK market, and MINI adding another 1.84%. Exclusivity? They're everywhere! And yet the 3-Series on the face of it the German equivalent of a Mondeo - continues to exert an almost magical hold on British buyers.
A few days swanning around in the latest 330d M Sport saloon served merely to ram that message home. Here I must declare an interest I own and run a 323iSE, so I suppose I'm biased. Not so biased, though, that I can't prefer the shape of my car to the angular and to my eye rather ungainly lines of the current 3-Series crop.
Full review here