I still remember trips with my father to the track in the early 1990s. We were on a mission; he wanted to look at every single E28 M5 and was dead-set on getting one. 1993 would be the year he finally would; to me, the amount of money he forked over seemed to be pretty astonishing for a used car, but at that time it was the newest car the family owned. Still, it seemed dated already; hard to consider seemed that at that time it was only 5 years old! But this was the time when ever successive generation of car made huge leaps in terms of innovation; frankly, exterior design and interior design haven’t become nearly as revolutionary as they once were. If you step out of a E28 into an E34, certainly you can recognize the DNA; but one feels very surely designed in the late 1970s, and the other is much more modern. The same can be said outside; clearly the E28 is a great looking design, but by 1988 it was quite dated and the last of the German holdouts for non-integrated bumpers to my knowledge. Even Volkswagen did a better job of hiding and integrated the 5 m.p.h. bumpers! The E34 was really a modern revolution to the 5 series; aerodynamic, refined, luxurious and handsome, it once again reset the bar for the mid-sized luxury sedan. And as it had before, the M5 also set the bar for performance sedans, with the same S38 inline-6 under the hood. It was magical still, even if it felt a little less raw compared to the earlier editions. While the E28 long languished as the unappreciated M product from the 1980s, slowly but surely it has gained more appreciation. Today, it seems the of the original pre-E36 cars, the one remaining value is the E34 – ironically, the upscale replacement for the aging dinosaur E28:
