Estate of the art
HELLO BMW M3 TOURING, VAUXHALL ASTRA GSE & VW ID. BUZZ + GOODBYE AUDI E-TRON GT + DRIFTING OUR PORSCHE TAYCAN
Will the warm glow continue over six months?
Hello
The 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 Mdivision’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 loadbay. 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
