Chris harris

ILLUSTRATION: PAUL RYDING

Enough of all this electric car nonsense. I’m sure they’ll work one day, but they don’t in 2023, unless you’re very rich and don’t really need a car. So let’s do something controversial and celebrate just how good the old internal combustion engined motor car has become. We appear to live in a world where we have to celebrate new, crap solutions that don’t work and to sneer at things which work perfectly well because they don’t fit certain agendas.

I have now covered 8,000 miles in the new BMW M3 Touring. BMW wants to tell you it’s focused on electrical things and it’ll use the word ‘mobility’ in ways as yet undiscovered by the rest of the English speaking world to inform you of its honourable aims. And yet it’s not really allowed to tell us that in the M3 Touring it has casually produced one of the best cars ever. There are marginally faster, more glamorous ways to punt yourself, a couple of kids and the family dog around, but none are as fun or as annoyingly competent as this thing.

I feel genuinely sad for cars like the M3 Touring. They should be basking in the glory of what car companies have achieved since Karl Benz patented his Motorwagen in 1886. This is a car that can accelerate as fast as most modern sports cars. A car that has so much technology within its chassis that it helps an average driver appear far more talented than they have any right to look. A car that makes you wonder why BMW’s software engineers can’t expand their work into human personalities.

There are a few social media campaigns swirling around Instagram about the M3 wagon, but no active advertising – 10 years ago BMW would have told its ad agency to rustle up some punchy words to support its new hotshot. Above the logo and best in class mission statement “The Ultimate Driving Machine” would probably have been a mixture of goading real sports car makers and other German rivals. But not any more. At times, BMW appears almost ashamed to build cars like the M3 Tour