With Christmas 2014 now in the rear view mirror, did everyone get what they wanted from Santa? If not, here’s something of a late present to make up for it: a Dakar Yellow E36 M3. I’m not typically a fan of yellow on cars, but Dakar Yellow looked a treat on this M3. Much like Estoril Blue, it was a color almost made for this car, accentuating the styling which was a crisp update of the E30 3 series. This M3 with well under 100,000 miles comes to us from our friends at Shift Bespoke Automotive in Laguna Hills, California.
If you were looking to make a splash in the late 1980s with some serious German iron, there were three cars that stick out in my mind. The Porsche 928, the Mercedes 560SL and this car, the BMW M6. These were the dream cars of my childhood and for me formed an almost perfect triumvirate of engineering, performance and status. Out of the three, however, the BMW will always be my favorite. It combined grand touring luxury with a nice serving of aggressiveness to form one lusty high-performance express. The original M3 is still getting a lot of attention in the collector market but it seems as if there has been an awakening to the original 6er as of late. This M6 for sale in Connecticut is one for the purists, with under 40,000 miles on the clock and no alternations to speak of.
The M3 Convertible. A rather curious beast, no? Especially if one considers the M3’s original purpose of a tool by which to dominate DTM racing. However, there has been a drop top version of every M3 since the original E30, even if we didn’t see that one officially on US shores. With the change in nomenclature, we now have the M4 convertible to compliment the M4 coupe and M3 sedan. Each new iteration has debuted more powerful engines, advanced gearboxes and we even saw a new folding hardtop on the E93 M3, carried over to the M4.
These two M3s are for sale in New York and represent a definite split in approach to the fast convertible formula. First up, we’ll take a look at this 2005 E46 M3, which is armed with the rev-happy S54 inline-6 under the hood that everyone knows and loves mated to a good old row-your-own 6-speed manual.
I’d like to try a social experiment if you’ll allow me; I’d take an E30 M3 listing and say absolutely nothing about it. My hypothesis is that it wouldn’t matter; the car would still generate lots of comments both positive and negative, outlining both the strengths of the E30 and the rapid appreciation of the market. The convergence of factors that has resulted in the M3 market as we see it today is the evolution of not only a naturally occurring timeline coupled with a increase of personal wealth vis-a-vis the ownership group juxtaposed with those who actually ponder ownership. This, in turn, can be viewed as in part the skeuomorphic racing details of the M3 coupled with the natural analogue interface of the E30 chassis. Immersion in the marketplace has resulted in datafication as we try to quantify the various appeals of the models and even sub-models, while the scalability of the marketplace seems to utilize fuzzy logic – models constantly morphing in and out of vogue as the relative price of ownership fluctuates. Modularity in the E30 platform has not helped but convoluted the matter. Coupled with the emergence of internet fora the M3 is the first truly viral car. The rapid influx of various examples in order to take advantage of these previously stated confluence of factors has resulted in, ironically, crowdsourcing in an effort to elicit an explanation:
While it’s still possible to find E30s for reasonable prices, they typically have a lot of miles or serious issues. Prices for clean examples have drifted northwards, following their golden-child M3 brethren. Every once in a while we get a good look at what an “ideal” example costs, which in my mind is a clean, unmodified car with 50k-100k miles. Today’s 325is fits most of the bill, looking impressively stock and well maintained inside and out after just 59k miles. The glaring mark against it is the automatic transmission; it’s like buying a classic piano but installing a self-playing mechanism. While the mileage and condition would put it in the top echelon of E30s, I have to imagine those really interested in the nicest of these cars would spend their time and money finding an ideal, manual-equipped car.
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