Posted by Jamie Hibbard at 4:00PM on Tuesday 29 April, 2008 4 Comments
On Friday evening I parked the M3 Convertible outside The Royal Oak pub in Pimlico after a non-stop drive back from the factory in Munich (read the full story in the June issue of Top Gear, on sale May 15th).
A bit later on, while I was outside getting some, erm, fresh air, a man stopped next to the car with his girlfriend, and started talking very animatedly in Scandawegian.
He was pointing at the car, cupping his hand up against the glass to look in the window, and generally doing a decent amount of tyre kicking.
I asked him if he wanted to sit in it, folded the roof away via the button on the fob and let him into the driver's seat.
It turns out that he used to own the last M3 drop-top in Sweden, and has missed it ever since. He'd been talking to - or maybe at - his girlfriend all day about the new paddle-shifting seven-speed M Double Clutch Transmission, and couldn't believe he'd stumbled across one in town the very night they went on sale in the UK.
He asked how much quicker the 0-62 time was with the new DCT - at 5.1 seconds, it's 0.2 seconds quicker than the manual - and if the new tin-top made it heavier than the previous soft-topped one, which it does.
It weighs in at 1,905kg against the previous M3 convertible's 1,730kg, but the new one also has 10 per cent more power and 30 per cent more torsional stiffness.
BMW reckons the roof folds down in 22 seconds, but by my timings it was quicker than that... though a bit longer to go back up again.
I regret not giving Sweden a ride round the block in it now, to be honest, because the four-litre V8 sounds awesome with the roof down, especially when the throttle blips on downshifts.
Nevertheless, he walked away saying that he was definitely going to buy one, which is quite something from five minutes in the front seat.
Expect to see lots of these on the streets by the time summer hits us.
4 Comments for "BMW M3 Convertible"
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Well, that's the power of BMW (and maybe the red leather a little bit)
They sell themselves and once you go BMW, you never want to go back. The hard-top makes it a really nice all-season car.
I wonder if this car will attract the same people the E46 soft-top attracted, given that this is the most heavy (almost overweight?) M3 ever produced despite the snarl and poke of the new powerplant.
Will it attract more of the CLK 63 crowd than M3 crowd; more of a car for booting it around in, than that of a carefully crafted driving instrument?
It is fabulous, but it's a real porker! Cars are just getting heavier and heavier. My own 3 series is 1430kg and that's too porky! And this is nearly a 2 tonner. I would like to see them cut out about 700kgs, without reducing the luxury. Anyway, I want one!
He found a girlfriend who's interested in paddle-shift transmissions?
I have to go to his pub...