You've latched onto the wrong sense of the word distinction: the quality of being distinguishable vs. that of being distinguished or worthy. I mean the latter. True, but it was a convenient excuse to exclude it from the list so I could name ten others.
The E30 ix came with fender flares? Interesting! Presumably to clear wider tires? This would make sense on an all-wheel-drive model like an ix.
Yeah, I was going to say it's really obvious when you see a 325iX due to the fender flares, rocker panel extensions that meld into the flares and the increased ride height. The car immediately makes itself known as something different than a typical E30.
Bah, we've all listed cars we own. lol I think I may have gone a little overboard with my list though... Naaaaaah.
Not necessarily true. I listed EIGHT cars I don't own, have never owned and likely may never buy. Admiring a car doesn't obligate me to buy one, and some of them, like an E31 8-series, are prohibitively expensive to keep maintained. The same is true for an E39 M5 and a Z8, both of those two coincidentally have exactly the same engine.
Appreciating technology in a historic context is very difficult and requires years of careful observation and exposure to those vehicles. Unless they look cool, their importance is not self-evident. None of us, when young, had a good perspective on history. On the other side of the coin, most of us are interested in cars that represents today's leading edge of technology. It doesn't matter that we can see them in a car store. The sad part of "the leading edge" is that it has become so intangible (software management systems, hidden energy recycling systems, even turbochargers hidden from view under black plastic shrouds); the changes are no longer visually exciting or mechanically comprehensible. I think that we technophiles, young and old, crave that lost tangibility.
Yeah and those fake "eyebrows" at the top of the grille didn't help It made the whole grille design look like an afterthought. "Oh yeah, twin kidney grilles, not a wide-W shaped opening at the grille! Oops!"
