BMW 335i sedan 2007 Review

That's the myth, anyway. Buyers seldom need inducement to blow their new car's sticker price out by four figures — plus dealer delivery and government charges, of course.

With prestige marques, it takes only the ticking of a few boxes to get north of$10,000 in extras.

Take BMW's 335i sedan, which has made the finals of Carsguide's Car of the Year (go to www.carsguide.com.au).

With add-ons and enhancements, the 335i's already eye-watering $104,500 sticker price can end up closer to $120,000.

Some of these items may be desirable, but none are necessary. One of them is actually detrimental.

Although, as P. T. Barnum pointed out, while there's one born every minute, at least safety is becoming a not-for-sale item.

In the small-to-medium segment, Australia's most fervently contested, Subaru and Mitsubishi have embarrassed the pack with the standard airbag and ESP packages on lesser Impreza and Lancer variants.

You can bet that the days of optional so-called “safety packs” are numbered. That leaves bling enhancements such as sunroofs.

If you want to fork out thousands for a hole in the roof that's pointless in winter and aircon-negating in summer, you deserve to be grist for the Barnums of this auto life.

Then there are those additions — supposedly performance-enhancing but primarily superficial — that have the effect of ruining the ride and, in certain salient cases, seriously sapping your will to live.

Manufacturers spend millions testing ride and compliance. We then spend thousands destroying them with phat rims the engineers never envisaged and dropped ride height that guarantees painful impact with every speed bump encountered.

It helps not one bit that NSW roads are among the world's worst, but some cars are disadvantaged by having been designed for the first world.

Which is why Alfa Romeo's 159 Ti V6 is a pleasant surprise. Lowered, tautened and shod in low-profile rubber though it is, the Alfa's enhanced handling doesn't come at the cost of liveability.

As we found in our recent road test, an entirely reasonable $2000 premium over the already excellently equipped standard 159 brings both sharper turn-in and sharper looks.

You may want to approach steep driveways with caution, but hitting a pothole won't send you to the other side of the road.

Which brings us back to that 335i.

The model tested in January brought forth from us the gushing that has accompanied any Bimmer equipped with that superb bi-turbo in-line six.

And this example was fairly basically equipped — unlike our C-COTY car, which had the $4500 M Sport kit.

With special alloys, beefy steering wheel, aerodynamic go-fast bits, sports seats, sports suspension and those coveted M badges, this is quite the extras package.

And, in daily driving, it comes close to rendering this circa $120,000 sports sedan a weeping misery.

Although the M bits enhance its on-track performance and look the goods, they make the simple act of driving rapidly along a straight B-road a camber-chasing, traction-control-activating nightmare.

In fact, open-road motoring in a 335i with sport suspension feels like you're driving up the garden path.