Category: Affordable Sports 
Price Range: £49,310 to £54,655
Awesomely fast, comfortable, great gearbox, practical cabin and boot.
Steering lacking in feedback, thirsty, not as exciting as you would expect.
This fast but spacious saloon is a worthy addition to the M heritage.
Following on last year's M3 Coupe, BMW has now launched a saloon version of its fourth-generation midsized M car - so if you're a family guy (or gal) who held off buying the Coupe because of the impracticality of only having two doors, your time has come.
OK, so the Saloon doesn't have a cool carbon-fibre roof and it's 0.1 seconds slower in the sprint to 62mph, but it's got two extra doors, more room in the back and a bigger boot, so it's easier to share the experience of travelling in a car powered by BMW's fabulous 4.0-litre V8.
The M3 Saloon is a very different machine than the standard 3-Series, due to the fact that it only shares 20% of its parts with the host car. This is apparent at first sight: the M3 is much more muscular looking, thanks to the powerdome on the bonnet, air intakes at the front, side vents, rear diffuser and double twin exhaust pipes at the rear. It's certainly a striking car: when testing it, the M3 Saloon drew admiring looks wherever we went.
And the price for all this power, performance and head-turning looks? A not-insignificant £49,415, which sounds a lot, but it's less than the Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG and the now out-of-production Audi RS4.
Latest Readers' Drives About the BMW 3-Series
wrote on 08 10 2007