Comparison Tests
From the November 1990 issue
What we're about to do here is tell you about the Best Sedan in the World Regardless of Price. What we're not going to do is bore you with disclaimers that say choosing the winner took so much effort that it wasn't any fun. After all, how could spending a week with four cars worth nearly $350,000 not be any fun?
The answer is that it can't and it was. Mind you, when you're driving something that costs more than some condominiums, there's a compulsion to look both ways with greater care than you would with lesser cars. It's one thing to explain how you got shopping-mall acne on the door of a Dodge Colt and quite another to explain away dings on a Bentley that weren't there when you borrowed it.
But we overcame these problems—and a few others you're going to hear about—in an effort to name what we believe to be the best four-door luxury transportation you'd ever be able to find. You should note that the "value" category you normally see in our comparison tests is absent. Price, in other words, doesn't matter. Only excellence.
The BMW 750iL won, so you can stop right here if you aren't interested in what it's like to drive cars that really rich people get to drive and if you don't care how we reached that conclusion. But, on the assumption that you're as curious as we were when we started this project, we'll continue to elaborate on what we learned and how we learned it.
The first thing we found out when we tried to assemble a Bentley Turbo R, a BMW 750iL, and a Mercedes-Benz 560SEL is that the Bentley people don't want to part with their cars. Well, they do want to part with their cars, but so many wealthy Americans are hammering on their dealers that they sell them all. They told us to hang on—there'd be a car for us to test soon.
When the day finally came, nine months after we'd started asking, the Bentley man got run into by a truck as he was on his way here with the car. By then, of course, we were too far into this exercise to quit. Our friend Rick Mancuso, proprietor of Lake Forest Sports Cars near Chicago, saved the day by arranging for us to borrow a valued customer's Turbo R. Richard Templer's Bentley was, however, a 1989 model and did not have the new electronic suspension. Right there, we were in trouble.
We next decided to include a $44,700 Lexus LS400 in the test. The inclusion of a car with a base price half that of the Mercedes-Benz may look dumb, but it wasn't. The Lexus went into the mix as a control car because it won our "Showdown" luxury-sedan comparison test last December, besting six worthy competitors.
We felt, therefore, that the Lexus could help us find out how good is good. Much as you would send a Triple-A shortstop up to the majors to see if he's got the stuff to play with the big guys. The Lexus has the right stuff, so now you know that. But if you want to know about the Bentley and the Mercedes-Benz and how they compared with the Maximum Bimmer and the light-on-the-wallet Lexus, keep reading.
