Empowered

The M Badge. For those who know what it represents it's a sign of motorsports bred excellence in a BMW. For those who don't? Well a colleague of mine thinks all M-badged cars are company vehicles for the firm which supplies our Spray Mount.

The minority of people in the world that care to know what constitutes an M car are alert to all the tiny differences that mark out the special version - the flared wheelarch, the deep-dish alloy, the particular bore of the exhaust which is a dead giveaway to the cognoscenti. And that large number of people who don't care aren't in the least impressed anyways.

So why on earth are people still buying little M badges and putting them on the back of cooking Beemers? And even putting them onto Beemers that would never get an M version in a billion years like the X3 I saw in the IKEA carpark today (the "I really really wanted an X5 but things in my life haven't quite worked out as well as I'd hoped" bimmer).

To summarise: a fake M badge on a BMW. 95% of folk don't know or care what it signifies, for the other 5% it proves that the owner is a colossal twat.