Some cars ingrain themselves so deeply in your consciousness you have to wonder if some black magic was involved. After all, a car is just a car, right? It was the 90s, Slash, Hetfield, Vedder, and Cobain et al were raising musical hell with heavy metal and fashionable grunge, but U2 stayed the course with their brand of rock, experimenting with electronica but never falling off the axis of cool.
In like manner, sports cars were getting seriously fast. Chrysler rolled out the Viper, Chevrolet kept improving the Corvette, and Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota the twin turbo 3000GT, 300ZX and Supra, respectively. In the midst of this all, BMW unveiled the “E36” M3, a bantamweight in terms of power but an all-singing, all-dancing prize fighter everywhere else. I still have the comparo articles from Car & Driver and Road & Track where the US-market M3 soundly beat all comers with its harmonious blend of speed, agility, refinement, and everyday drivability.
Fast forward more than a decade and some things have changed. Slash has faded into obscurity, Cobain is just a memory, and Vedder is.... where is he, anyway? Hetfield is on a comeback with Metallica’s Death Magnetic, but heavy metal ain’t exactly what you’d want to hear every day of the year. And sports cars are in their second Renaissance, where refinement is prized as highly as outright speed.
Yet today’s M3 is just as desirable as it ever was, but now it’s wrapped in an ultra-chic package that oozes superstar appeal. You will feel like Bono behind its wheel, guaranteed.
The test unit came in rocket-red, and the first thing you’ll notice after is the carbon-reinforced plastic roof. Aside from cutting some fat off and lowering the car’s center of gravity, it looks Pretty Damn Cool. Ditto the bulging “powerdome” hood, which had to be enlarged to accommodate the small-displacement 4.0-liter V8 (previous M3s had an inline-6). Check out the little details like the aerodynamic sculpting of the side mirrors and side skirts, the stealth gray “M Light” alloy wheels, or check out the rear: quad tailpipes, the business ends poking out like large-caliber machine guns. Or check out the engine spec: Four liters, four cams, thirty-two valves... and four hundred twenty horsepower at eight thousand three hundred revolutions per minute.
Fire up the engine with the oh-so-cool Engine Start button and the V8 rumbles to life like something out of NASCAR, a deliciously bassy, slightly gravelly “WHOORRRMMM...!” that mellows out once you’ve warmed it up. BMW’s controversial SMG transmission is wisely absent in the M3, whose performance in the big brother M5 left something to be desired in the area of refinement. Instead, you get a six-speed, short throw stick shift just as God intended. The clutch is neither feather light nor truck heavy. At low speeds shuffling between first and second gear, the drivetrain is on the balky side what with all that torque (40 kg-m at 3,900 rpm, to be exact) underneath your right foot.
But redemption is just a Skyway away. Open up the throttle and you leave the city of blinding lights at a rate of 4.8 seconds to 100 kph. Keep your right foot planted and, given enough road, terminal velocity is an electronically governed 250 kph. Do this and the engine rips into full song, a melodious, deep-throated orchestra of precisely machined valves and pistons opening and closing in perfect harmony. You can even try redlining the engine in second gear out of pure academic curiosity: 110 kph at 8,000 rpm. Sweet.
But the M3 has never been a one-trick pony. BMW has always prided itself on making chassis that were “faster than the engine”, and the M3 stays true. The M3’s underpinnings give it the dynamism of a cheetah on steroids. High-speed straight line tracking on concrete roads is nearly as good as its lesser and more civilized 3-series brethren, even on the frightfully bumpy STAR Tollway. You can hurtle past the countryside at 180 kph and your passengers will think you’re cruising at 120.
On narrow, twisting roads, you’ll feel like you’re in your personal Nurburgring as the M3 tracks like a slot car. Visibility is excellent all around, with a low window beltline and large greenhouse area to give you near-perfect spatial orientation. Once you’re strapped in, acclimatization comes as naturally as zipping up your fly. Controls fall easily to hand, instrumentation falls to the peripheral vision, and the car’s extraordinary performance is as easy – and tempting – to use as if you were in an ordinary car. You never get the impression the car will bite back. The steering is rich in feedback and ultra-responsive but never hypersensitive, and the chassis grips the road in a choke-hold worthy of an MMA fighter. Any fears that the choice of a V8 would ruin the M3’s fabled handling balance are unfounded, as it pivots on its axis with little hint of nose-heavy understeer. Stopping power from the huge ABS-assisted disks is immense even from 200-kph, like the hand of God pulling you back from certain death.
As usual, BMW equips the M3 with electronic aids like stability systems and traction control, but so far as I could tell their operation is invisible. Or you would need to be going extremely, dangerously fast to ever trigger their activation. Honestly, the car now has so much going, turning, and stopping performance built in that you would have to be a complete doofus – or monumentally unlucky – to crash it. Other than the button for deactivating the stability systems, there are two other function buttons to customize your experience: “Power” and “EDC”. The former dials back engine power and throttle responsiveness for when you’re just tooling around the city, the latter stands for “Electronic Damper Control” and lets you adjust the suspension for comfort, sport, or track-like stiffness. In “Sport”, the suspension is supple and feels glued to ordinary roads, only turning choppy over pavement expansion joints.
There’s no question that BMW has created one of the best sports cars on the planet then, but it may have also created one of the friendliest. The cockpit is all business, but with a leavening of subtle touches to separate your M3 from the masses. Ergonomics are basic 3-Series logical, with carbon fiber weave sexifying the dash and door panels. Other than the variable redline tachometer which moves higher up the range as the engine warms up, there are no fancy dials or displays to amuse or confuse the driver. “M” badges are discreetly sewn into the leather of the steering wheel and shifter. For fan-boys of the M Division, every day is a beautiful day here.
The M3 is a genuine four-passenger coupe, not a two-seater with a token rear shelf. Ingress to the rear buckets is a mere inconvenience as you pass through the front doors, but once settled in, the seats are genuinely comfortable. There’s enough leg- and headroom at the back for anyone less than six feet in height. After a four drive, neither I nor my three other passengers were especially raring to get out of the car. Trunk space is also commendable, the compartment easily swallowing 6 gym bags for day-long dive trip. This is aided by the choice of run-flat tires though, which means there’s no full-size spare to eat up trunk space.
It even minimizes the pains of driving a sports car with a seating position that’s lower than a sedan’s but not quite “sitting on the road”, motorized B-pillar arms that push out the front seatbelts so you don’t have to contort to get at them, and a temperature sensor that lowers the windows when you unlock the car from outside on a hot day. And fuel consumption is actually pretty good too. Four days and 400+ kilometers of city and fast highway driving yielded 6.7 klicks per liter of high-octane. It’s not going to set any fuel economy records, but still better than some other thirsty speedsters from Europe and the Orient (BMW’s own M5 gave me back 4 kpl with its monster V10).
In the big scheme of things, there are other sexier, faster, and more exotic cars, but in BMW’s M3 you might finally find what you’ve been looking for.
The Good
• Superstar style.
• Sizzling performance.
• Everyday drivability.
• Four-passenger roominess.
The Bad
• Occasionally balky drivetrain.
The Verdict
• A seriously fast car that also happens to be the sweetest thing.