In car bore circles we delight in debating whether the Dino really was a Ferrari, or the whether a supercharger really is better than a turbocharger. Things can sometimes get heated, are never settled and are really quite nerdy when you think back about your evening. Fortunately the most recent ‘chat’ I had involved the Volkswagen Golf GTi and amazingly we all agreed. The first two derivatives were amazing, the next two were dire and now Volkswagen is back on form with their fifth. What seemed strange to us though was that there was no discernible drop in sales numbers between each model, despite the very public media lashing the sub-par versions got.

The only plausible answer must be something that I’d thought died out years ago – brand loyalty. When my granddad is telling me war stories I have perfected the interested look, whilst my brain does everything but listen to him. However some droplets of information seep through including the quaint fact that shopkeepers used to know what you’d be buying dependent on the day of the week it was. Now once you’ve built a rapport to that extent it doesn’t matter whether the apples become rotten or the milk has gone sour, you are loyal to that shopkeeper to the very end. Read the rest of this entry »