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.
There’s a clean red 318is I see around the island I live on fairly regularly and these Sports Sedan Lite models have always intrigued me. While my E28 is an engine-first beast, the E30 318is has always held the same allure that my later-Golf-engined Rabbit Pickup had – a light, direct driving experience with an enthusiastic but modest engine that rewarded momentum driving. Without the inline-6, the 318is becomes all about the chassis. And when said chassis is one of the most legendary ever built, that’s a good thing.
This 318 has covered 171k miles but looks like a car with half that. The silver exterior and black interior both look outstanding – someone has taken serious care of the paint and leather. The chrome/gold ESM wheels that come with the car are hideous to me, but it comes with the original wheels so the costume jewelry could be sold to get some classier rollers. Some 16†Style 5s would do the trick just perfectly. That’s really my only complaint, though, as the higher mileage has been mitigated with outstanding maintenance and care.
Back to reality. After a slew of very high-dollar Porsches we’ll come back down to earth to return again to a perennial favorite the 911SC, and what has been a consistent feature of late in the reasonable value camp with a 911SC Targa. The great thing about Porsche is that even though we have stepped away from their supercars and vintage racers, it doesn’t mean that we’ve completely dissociated ourselves from the roots of those machines. While we certainly won’t see much shared DNA between a 911SC and the 918 Spyder there is still shared heritage and we certainly would find links between the early 356 and 911s within even a basic 911SC like the one we see here. And compared with many of the previous examples this one even comes in a really nice color. Here we have a Petrol Blue Metallic 1980 Porsche 911SC Targa, located in Maryland, with 81,345 miles on it.
BMW took a big leap at the end of the 1980s and introduced some pretty extreme design language. First was the E31 8-series, a seeming quantum leap from the outgoing 6-series. That chassis pioneered, for better or worse, a tremendous amount of technical and electronic innovation for BMW. Side by side with the more famous Grand Tourer though was a diminutive roadster BMW produced based heavily on the E30 chassis. Instead of a heavy reliance on computer technology, the futuristic (hence Z for the German word for future – Zukunft) plastic bodied Z1 looked like a supercar even if it didn’t go like one. Park one next to a E30 convertible and you’d never know the two are related! They never made it to U.S. shores and only around 8,000 examples were ever produced, but surprise! They’re 25 years old now….
As the final of my dream car posts we’ll settle in to the Amelia Island auctions for a group of exquisite Porsches and some of the most expensive available. Rather than stunning and rare color combinations these Porsches attract our notice through their historical relevance and, for many of them, their longevity. By now most are aware of Jerry Seinfeld’s love of Porsches; it’s been a long documented affair ever since the comedian became known across the world. He has decided to sell quite a few of them – 18 cars in all, 16 of those being Porsches – at Gooding & Company’s Amelia Island Auctions on March 11. None of the cars are inexpensive – the lowest priced likely being his 1960 Volkswagen Beetle – and many of them will stretch well into seven figures. For fans of Porsches it’s a very interesting time as many of Seinfeld’s cars are near impossible to find in this condition, with some of them near impossible to find at all. I have chosen a few examples to show here that particularly caught my eye. I won’t go through the details of each car since those details are extensive and well chronicled on the auction listing for each. Click through to read about each car’s history and also to view the rest of the Seinfeld lineup at Amelia Island:
