good to hear from you.
Times change and things evolve, and brand X needn't drive like it did 20 years ago, but some of the companies have definitely recognised and worked on keeping an identity or feel to their cars across decades whilst other brands vary bizarrely model to model - more driven by the choices of the team engineering them. Some OEMs have a kind of brand 'tsar' for chassis and powertrain respectively to iron this out. Parry Jones at Ford and Forni at Ducati spring to mind. This tends to work better at delivering a more consistent experience. Ironically some of the systems flexibilities works against delivering a specific brand experience - I'm thinking learning gearboxes that adapt to your style rather than imprinting how a certain car should drive. And ESP has certainly homogenised things*. Remember a lot of the brand characters came from engineering limitations in the past. The potential exists now to pretty much set up any car the way you like it - pedal map, torque curve, chassis comp and rebound, roll, yaw/slip and so on - but then it wouldn't drive 'like a' anymore.
*Interestingly to digress, I think ESP has certainly made some companies/teams lazy. I'm thinking about what happens when you deactivate them. Some cars still handle and some are a handful. Some of the requirements for 'safety' have certainly hurt - there has been such a demand for linearity in chassis response that now a lot of cars go grip, grip, grip, crash, rather than grip, slip, drift, drift more, slide, wuhay... and a lot of the character was in the transition from grip to slip to drift to slide but most drivers can't cope with slip to drift.
Velociphile
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