The wisdom-of-the-crowd – the aggregation of collective knowledge, experience, and wisdom to become better informed – has few serious critics. Idiosyncratic noise will inevitably distort the opinion of an individual and lead to a degradation of interpretation; after all, a solitary view can also be expressed as a skewed survey with a sample size of one. So the received wisdom that the BMW 3 Series is a great car is…

The premium car market is flourishing, even in these straitened times. Dominated by the three German makers, who between them account for over 93 percent of UK sales in the premium sector, it is Audi who sell the most cars in the UK – and the A4 is a crucial part of that, fighting tooth and nail with the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes C Class for the all-important business…