I get that the wild colors offered by BMW on the E46 M3 don’t appeal to everyone, and I’m aware they tend to be the colors I focus on. What’s special about them to me is that they exist at all; you don’t have to agree that they’re the colors you’d buy, but isn’t the world a better place for them having been made? If I bought a M3, I’d really want to feel special. Of course, getting into any M car is a special experience, right? Well, it certainly was a bit of an occasion in the 1980s, but by the E36 and E46 M3s, production numbers meant they were reasonably common. With over 71,000 E36s made and over 85,000 E46s produced, odds of you seeing another going down the road are pretty strong. Heck, in my daily commute I count on seeing at least one – try that with an older M car. But what I see daily are typical German car colors; blacks, silvers, greys and whites. They look nice, I agree, but to me the appeal is what the M cars were in the 1980s – an event. It’s not so much that I want to be noticed, but more that I want to stand apart from the crowd. And to me, Phoenix Yellow and Laguna Seca Blue are two of the best ways to differentiate your M experience from the norm. Today, there’s a lovely example of the later available on eBay:
Month: September 2014
Before the Touareg’s efficiency-minded V6 diesel, Volkswagen put their bonkers 5.0 liter V10 TDI in the family jellybean, a move that garnered little fanfare other than a brief internet stardom at the expense of a Chevy 2500 HD’s pride. With 313hp and 553lb-ft of torque, a small V10 TDI badge was the only indication that a monster lurked within. Today’s example comes in a quiet grey on grey, all the better to surprise the stump when you rip it out of the ground, or pull an unsuspecting 747 like the one a V10 TDI towed in 2006. I miss the gorgeous saddle brown leather of the last Touareg I wrote up , but this one is priced exactly where that one ended and has 30k fewer miles. It’s still well above Blue Book, but clearly there are diesel enthusiasts out there ready to pay for MOAR POWAH.
Click for details: 2004 Volkswagen Touareg V10 TDI for sale on Richmond, Virginia’s Craigslist
2 CommentsThe Euro’d E28 M5 with just 62k miles Carter wrote up last week went for a reasonable $21k, showing that the market for M5s is strong but not skyrocketing. Extra-low mileage examples are few and far between, and today’s 28k-mile example is being sold by the notoriously high-pricing Enthusiast Auto Group. Forum guesses put the price as high as $80k, which may be what EAG is asking but is not what they’re going to get. While it certainly looks like a sheltered, sub-30k mile creampuff, the door-card speakers are a strikingly bad choice. Low mileage is great, but without full originality I don’t see the point.
Click for details: 1988 BMW M5 for sale at Enthusiast Auto Group
3 CommentsThe awesome looking 4-speed 280SE from 1977 that I wrote up in late July has reappeared on the marketplace, having not sold the first time around. This car appears to be really unique and well presented and would certainly turn heads at any show. I especially love the AMG-spec wheels and Euro-goodies that slim down and beef up the S-Class just a bit. At $12,000, this seems like a good deal for a great vintage Benz:
CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1977 Mercedes-Benz 280SE on eBay
The below post originally appeared on our site July 26, 2014:
Comments closedI’ve owned and loved modified Volkswagens now for going on twenty years, so I’m certainly not new to the scene. Obviously, being a popular tuning and performance platform since its launch, the GTi has undergone just about every conceivable permutation of modifications. Despite what would seem to be an endless pool of candidates, though, I often find examples lacking a clean, well put together look. I’ve also found as I’ve gotten older that the cars that really stand out to me aren’t the wildly modified cars, but the subtle cars; cars that manage to integrate their modifications well into what already was a good platform. Let’s be honest; modifying cars is a very personal endeavor, so of course there are going to be varied opinions about what looks good. To me, find a clean VR6 Mk.III in close to original spec but with just the right hints of spice to make it stand out and be a little less vanilla, and it’s perfect. Make sure those mods are on one of my favorite colors – Windor Blue – and it’s one of the rare cases where I think the seller got it just right: