Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
For years, the BMW 3 series has been the standard bearer for someone looking for a sport sedan with a dash of luxury mixed in. Luckily for the enthusiast, it is one of the few cars in its class that offers the option for a manual transmission. While modern automatic gearboxes are more efficient, there are still those of us out there who enjoy rowing their own. This 2016 340i xDrive for sale in New Jersey is lightly used, but is one of the few big engined 3 series sedans so equipped these days.
Sometimes it’s not the performance of a car that catches my eye; case in point, today’s bottom-of-the-E46 range for the U.S. market 323Ci. The budget entry, these often seemed to be snapped up by junior executive types that wanted to say they owned a brand new BMW, but couldn’t actually afford a brand new BMW. Yet that’s not the car’s fault, and it’s a lovely design. For a budget coupe with a fair amount of practicality and a special feel, the 323Ci works just fine. This particular car is presented in rarely seen Light Yellow Metallic and is interestingly optioned with Sport Package and little else:
More wagons! Longroof E30s are popping up regularly these days, with quite a few in right hand drive configuration. They’re ending all up over the place in terms of price, but overall it seems like the relative glut of Tourings is creating a buyers market where the patient can get what they want.
This 325i isn’t the nicest we’ve seen, with a shredded drivers seat soiling an otherwise decent interior. The exterior is nice in Delphin Gray and lowered on H&Rs over some middling aftermarket wheels. It has just 125k miles, but almost no real details from the seller. The automatic is a bummer but seems to be the more common option on these wagons. We’ve seen them go from $4k to over $10k; can this one get off the ground with its $7,500 starting bid?
I was visiting Europe again last week, but through the magic of social media it feels as if I lived through the first blizzard of 2016. You know, there’s the people who like to post photos of their vehicle temperature gauge or the folks who kvetch over the mere sight of a snowflake when in reality those were the same people complaining about a warm winter in the first place. Let’s face it. It’s winter. It snows. Deal with it. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I would say it would be mighty tempting to own a car like this 1991 325ix just so I could post photos of everywhere I’d go with it in the white stuff.
The perfect counterpoint to Volkswagen’s GLi 16V like the one we featured earlier has to be the BMW 320is. Ostensibly, these two cars were aimed at close to the same market although the BMW was a fair chunk of change more expensive than the Jetta. But both were sports sedans, both came only as manuals, both had BBS wheels, grippy Recaro seats and sport suspension, and critically both featured a 2 liter 16V motor. But it’s there where the similarities end, because while Volkswagen rung 134 horsepower out of the 9A, BMW squeezed a seemingly unbelievable (for the time) 192 horsepower out of the lower displacement S14. For some time, the 100 hp/liter mark was considered about as good as naturally aspirated motors got and the 320is was hauntingly close with 192 ponies from 1,990 CCs – proportionately, more powerful than the larger 2.3 and 2.5 variants. We’ve previously covered this model a few times and so won’t go into lengthy detail about the history (plus, some of it is included in the listing), but if you wanted to understand why you’d pay more for one of these BMWs in the late 80s, that engineering feat alone was a good indication. As the E30 market has been red hot and importation becomes possible for more of these cars, we keep seeing them pop up:
