The Academy Award season is upon us again, and that got me thinking: If you were to take a poll of automotive journalists and ask them their pick for the single best car on the road, my bet is that BMW’s 335i would run away with it. It’s powerful, handsome, beautifully finished, a good value, neither too big nor too small and, of course, handles like no other sedan. Heck, I’d vote for it, and I don’t even think of myself as a BMW driver. Now, if we can agree that there might be a “best car,” it stands to reason there ought to be some sort of automotive equivalent of the Razzie Awards, too.
If so, I heartily nominate BMW’s curious ActiveHybrid X6 as America’s Most Incomprehensible Car. It’s an SUV … with a cramped cargo-carrying capacity. It’s an incredibly powerful sports machine … that also goes to heroic technological lengths to be energy-conscious, too. Ah, I can see it now: There’s the ActiveHybrid X6 up there on the Kodak Theater’s stage, taking a bow, clutching a little golden statuette – of a man scratching his head.
 If you’re familiar with the Toyota Prius’ hybrid technology, well, that doesn’t help at all in explaining BMW’s system. In fact, BMW’s solution is so complex that only occasionally, in my most coherent moments, do I glimpse some comprehension of it at all – and then it vanishes again. But here goes a description anyway.
Beneath the ActiveHybrid’s reshaped hood is the same 400-hp, twin-turbo, direct-injection V8 monster fitted to the X6 xDrive50i, but from there, things get pretty hairy. Taking the place of the xDrive50i’s conventional tranny sits a wildly complicated system whose internal riddles aren’t much illuminated by its moniker of “two- mode hybrid.”
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The Academy Award season is upon us again, and that got me thinking: If you were to take a poll of automotive journalists and ask them their pick for the single best car on the road, my bet is that BMW’s 335i would run away with it. It’s powerful, handsome, beautifully finished, a good value, neither too big nor too small and, of course, handles like no other sedan. Heck, I’d vote for it, and I don’t even think of myself as a BMW driver. Now, if we can agree that there might be a “best car,” it stands to reason there ought to be some sort of automotive equivalent of the Razzie Awards, too.