Category: Convertibles 
Price Range: £31,260 to £41,050
Exceptional refinement roof up or down, ride quality, build integrity.
Huge weight blunts performance and driving enjoyment, disappointing looks.
A fine car and better than its immediate rivals, but still asks the owner to pay a considerable dynamic penalty for the pleasure of top-down motoring.
For 20 years, the BMW 3-Series Convertible has been the aspirational drop-top among young, upwardly mobile fashionistas with a desire to look cool in public but a need for decent luggage space and back seats. And in recent years BMW has not only eschewed the idea of equipping its strong selling convertible with a fashionably retractable hard top, at times its engineers have been positively scornful on the subject. These folding metal roofs are not only heavy and therefore pejorative to performance, they are also difficult to package and put a lot of weight high up in the car, compromising the position of the centre of gravity and therefore adversely affecting handling. Not very BMW at all.
But BMW would never have grown into the fabulously successful and profitable company it is today by sticking to pure engineering principles even if it meant ignoring the will of its customers. So now that this, the fourth generation of 3-Series Convertible has broken cover, perhaps we should not be too surprised to discover its once fabric roof has indeed been replaced by a steel three-piece affair which will balletically turn your convertible into a coupe or vice versa in under 23 seconds.
The UK range comprises 320i, 325i, 330i and 330d and M3 models.
