Opposition benchmarking: Part one

Folks like us – Ti readers and contributors – are a bit obsessed. We bore our friends and families with ‘useful’ facts about how to recognise model year changes to our favourite cars. Our heads are full of might-come-in-handy data about horsepower, torque, performance and mass. We reflexively do that double-take head-swivel thing when we see a particularly interesting car.

We get mildly annoyed when we see a car we can’t actually name…and start to worry if we’re not losing our touch a bit. Our loved ones suggest that we spend too much time reading, watching and listening to magazines, videos and podcasts about cars. So yes, one could fairly say that many of us are obsessed with cars.

But do you know who are really obsessed? It’s the car makers themselves. Their obsession makes ours look like a mild passing interest, like watching Nordic skiing or curling on a weekend when there is nothing else on the telly. But it’s a different kind of obsession. Our punters’ obsession is generally reasonably eclectic – most of us are interested in various marques, and in cars from different periods.