Driver's Notebook: Mmm, Mmm, Mmm
December 1, 2007
Lives and personal standards are influenced by icons, masterworks, and cult figures. Rarely, however, do the three combine. Except, maybe, in BMW’s 3-Series, an inimitable lineage that is closing on the unsurpassable.
Consider the provenance. Born in 1975 to replace the sharp-edged, three-box BMW 2002, the trey first boomed as a cult car among young, urban professionals. They inhaled its light but sincere luxury, its nippiness and the snob appeal of an import as their rejection of the Buick Skyhawk.
At a current and climbing production rate of more than a half-million coupes, sedans, wagons and convertibles per year, the 3-Series will soon have outsold Citroën’s La Poubelle 2CV (10 million of the tin umbrellas unloaded in its lifetime), is poised to swamp Ford’s iconic Model T (15 million made) and may eventually threaten the supreme machine, the Volkswagen Beetle (with 20 million its historic mark).
A 3-Series has made one motoring magazine’s Ten Best list every year for 16 straight. It was World Car of the Year in 2006. As a coupe, convertible, sedan or wagon, it is the best-selling car of its class. As a staple of personal movement, it is matched only by Converse high-tops—and they’ve been around for 99 years.
Now for the masterpiece performance version of the 3-Series, the ne plus ultra of the breed: the 2009 BMW M3. Yet another acme that all other builders of quick-handling and highly poised luxury compacts in the $64,000 range must now try to catch.
When any automobile transitions from third to fourth generation, the passage is typically cautious, changes slight, and the all-important visuals more of a nervous shuffling. With the new M3, vis-à-vis the previous product from BMW’s Motorsport division, those differences are a pole vault.
Yesterday’s M3 came with a 3.2-liter, venerated, yet elderly, inline-6 engine producing 333 hp and 262 ft lbs of torque at 7,900 rpm. It ran from zero to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds with a top end of 155 mph. Governed, of course.
Tomorrow’s M3 (on sale spring 2008) has been fitted with a 4-liter V-8 (a chip off the old V-10 block found in the M5 and M6) developing 414 hp and 295 ft lbs of torque at a valve-bending 8,400 rpm. It hits 60 mph in 4.6 seconds with an electronically limited top speed of 155 mph (remove the chip and it will do 175 mph).
Although the standard transmission is still a 6-speed manual—with a paddle-shifting automatic lurking somewhere in Munich—little else remains untouched. With 80 percent of the body panels reworked from the base 3-Series coupe, there will be no doubts that an M3 and not some lesser 3-Series is growling in your rearview mirror.
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