BMW for me

As a graduation present, we bought my son a 2000 BMW 328i. It's a 4-door, manual, with 171,000 miles, and it is amazingly tight for its age. Although I owned a 2002 way back in the day, I've sort of stayed away from BMWs for a couple decades, so I was happy to see they still have that unmistakable "feel." After a few drives in my son's car ("hey . . .this thing is pretty sweet!"), the bug bit. I had to get my own.

So I started perusing the ads, doing research, and driving cars, and decided that an E92 coupe, in 328i form, would be the ticket. Although I was tempted by the 335i, they seem to have lots of problems with the twin turbo engine, and I didn't need a hot rod for street driving anyway.

So I now own a 2008 328i coupe, midnight blue with brown interior, automatic (Seattle traffic makes this a must), with the sport package. I love this car--it's pretty (love the snowflake wheels) quiet, comfortable, and plenty fast. And, as I discovered, BMW's depreciate very quickly, so my car, clean with 62K miles, was only $11K.

The car had a few BMW quirks and problems (the goofy seatbelt valets didn't work, the front valence is scraped up), but, wow, what a nice car. I can see why the BMW faithful are so fanatical.

Congrats!

There is a youtube video about the seatbelt valets.

Nice car. There are not a small amount of people in our local CCA that are turning to the 328i for dedicated track builds due to the reasons you mentioned- they're cheap, they're lighter, and the N52 tends to take well to modification and typically stands up to more abuse than it's bigger brother on track... I love the N54, don't get me wrong... but the 328i is a hell of a lot of car for the money right now.

golfduke wrote: Nice car. There are not a small amount of people in our local CCA that are turning to the 328i for dedicated track builds due to the reasons you mentioned- they're cheap, they're lighter, and the N52 tends to take well to modification and typically stands up to more abuse than it's bigger brother on track... I love the N54, don't get me wrong... but the 328i is a hell of a lot of car for the money right now.

Hmm . . .I didn't think about tracking one, but you're right. It would make a very cool track car, probably close to E46 M3 performance, but more modern, easily modified, likely with fewer miles, and cheaper. Around here, a nice E46 M3 is a $14-15K car. The 328i can be had in a manual, too, so even if one can't be found, the parts are there.

My current rack car is a 2009 Cayman S, and that's a love affair, but the 328i is a very cool concept. Thanks for the idea.

The main issue with E90/92 328i over E46 M3 as a track car is the diff. Realistically to be very fun you need to upgrade the diff and diffsonline has a practical monopoly on diffs for those cars and they are very spendy.

drdisque wrote: The main issue with E90/92 328i over E46 M3 as a track car is the diff. Realistically to be very fun you need to upgrade the diff and diffsonline has a practical monopoly on diffs for those cars and they are very spendy.

But worth every single penny, imho. It's the single most important modification I've done to my track car (e36 M3). It was transcendental the first time I had it on the track.