► New BMW M3 Touring driven
► 500 litres seats up
► xDrive as standard
The BMW M3 Touring has been one of the cars of the last year. Even as estate cars generally fall from favour, adding a larger boot to M division’s icon seems to have fired people with frothy passion and workdays whiled away on BMW’s configurator. I fully bought into the hype, summing up the M3 Touring as ‘the ultimate one-car garage’, and now I’m putting that to the test as the very lucky custodian of this one.
Will it prove as satisfying ferrying the family about and criss-crossing Britain as it was lapping Oulton Park and running over the Peak District? Er… probably. Looked at objectively, though, getting very excited about an estate is slightly peculiar in the high-performance context.
Not extra power. Not more top speed. Just extra boot space (500 litres seats up, 1510 litres with them folded) plus BMW’s nifty hands-free tailgate, glass that opens independently of the metal bit, and (optional) longitudinal strips with rubberised bits to stop things sliding about excessively in the load bay. Phwoar!
Then again, the M3 has always been about driving thrills with a side order of practicality – need more space than a 911? M3! – so dialling up usability without subtracting thrills is entirely logical for this G81 generation.
Plus there’s the schadenfreude of watching sports cars struggling to keep up with something that – never mind those faddy roof tents – you could easily sleep inside, and the fact that BMW has only ever teased us with an M3 Touring before – the E46 it finally revealed in 2016 only to push back in the warehouse.
Most of the spec is, of course, largely identical to the Touring’s less boxy siblings. The 3.0-litre, twin-turbocharged S58 straight-six comes only in 503bhp/479lb ft Competition trim for the UK, and British buyers are also exclusively offered the eight-speed auto, not the manual available elsewhere.
The Touring twist is that it comes only – not optionally – with M xDrive all-wheel drive. And there’s no carbonfibre roof. The suspension has been tuned for a car that – at 1865kg – weighs 85kg more than an M xDrive saloon and can carry more.
Chassis engineer Frank Weishar told me the main difference was the rear axle, with a new V-shaped brace under the back, spring rates ‘up to 10 per cent higher’ and ‘initial damping forces two to five per cent higher in rebound and compression’, depending on how hard the dampers are working.
Front spring rates are retained but rebound and compression damping is tweaked (from -5 to +7 per cent for rebound and -5 to +4 per cent for compression depending on damper speed). It’s all fiendishly complicated and fed into an algorithm that takes pitch and roll, speed, steering angle and more into account, but the takeaway is a big load lugger than drives like an M3 should.
Our test car had already done over 6000 miles when I got the keys, but other than a couple of tiny blemishes on the bonnet it looks and drives like new. The base price of £86,570 is £1500 over the M xDrive M3 saloon’s, and naturally there’s a tonne of standard equipment, including the lovely Isle of Man Green metallic, adaptive suspension, 19-inch front/20-inch rear alloys, heated electric memory seats, Harman Kardon audio, high-beam assistant and the Live Cockpit Professional infotainment system.
To this, BMW UK has added two options packs – in two pen strokes adding £20k to the tally. The M Pro pack costs £8395 for carbon-ceramic brakes and the M Driver’s pack, the latter bumping top speed to 180mph from 155mph. Then there’s the Ultimate pack, a 10-option bundle that includes keyless entry for all doors and the tailgate, a heated steering wheel and a drive recorder.
The most obvious telltales are the M carbon bucket seats in Merino leather that save 9.6kg and bring some pseudo race car seriousness to the luxurious cabin. The Ultimate pack also bundles in a number of semi-autonomous features including Driving Assistant Professional and Parking Assistant Plus.
Like many of you, I dislike active driver aids, but the Laserlights not only burn like football-pitch floodlights but do that clever thing of maintaining full beam while selectively dimming parts of the beam in traffic – things that would normally be lost in the dark are fully illuminated, simple as that.
All this comes at a price, with the Ultimate pack alone adding an extra – yikes – £11,815 to the bill. (I guessed few people would tick that box, only to discover five of 12 cars on a classifieds site had it.) The final tally, then, is £108,080, which is a large amount of money no matter how you look at it. But the ultimate one-car garage? We’re about to find out.
Read month 2 here
BMW M3 Touring Month 1
Price £86,570 (£107,080 as tested)
Performance 2993cc twin-turbocharged straight-six, 503bhp, 3.6sec 0-62mph, 180mph
Efficiency 27.2-28.0mpg (official), 27.4mpg (tested), 229-235g/km
C02 Energy cost 25.9p per mile
Miles this month 652
Total miles 7188