Well if performance is an excuse to jack the price up, I've seen cars bought and built for under $2000 destroy corvettes/vipers in a line and on a track. Same with corvettes destroying ferarris and lamborghinis. Performance can be had for next to nothing. If size and performance don't matter than that only leaves comfort/convienence/ features, warranty, reliability and little badges/company bragging rights to be sold on, which most cars are. (alot of people drive cars and only know the brand name "Hey why'd you buy that?" "Because it's a <insert overpriced auto just because of the name/chic factor here>" or.."because its expensive" "oh...good reason." If you buy this car for the warranty your paying ~40k for a piece of paper that says if it breaks and its our fault we will fix it. Which if it breaks and its the manufactures fault it's not reliable, so those dont work either. the warranty will be worthless if nothing breaks and it's not reliable if something breaks. I dunno who pays 40k just for comfort features either, thats like paying ~40k for seats.
You pay the price to have all of these things, I realize that but there are plenty of cars that have all of these for less than 30k let alone 40. The 335i already has the 40k bracket. I just thought these were marketed to a "lower end" crowd. By lower end I only mean not wanting or being able to pay 40k+ for a small, fun car.
Don't get me wrong I am really glad to see bmw coming into the smaller sport compact market and am really excited to see the 1 series (hell I really want one!) but would like to see them price the cars accordingly,
(http://www.motortrend.com/future/future_vehicles/112_0706_2008_bmw_1_series/ like here.) because the only thing that makes it different than any other luxury sport compact is "it's a bmw" and to me a company name isn't worth 10-20k.