Category: Affordable Sports 
Price Range: £49,525 to £54,860
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.
The M3 Saloon, like its Coupe sibling, is hugely impressive on the road. The 4.0-litre V8 sounds incredible when you give it its head, making progress rapid and allowing the car to just soak up the miles. There's always plenty of power on tap - 420bhp of it, available as far up the rev range as 8,300rpm with 295lb-ft of torque on tap down at 3,900rpm.
Then there's the magic M button on the steering wheel. Unlike the M5 and M6, you don't get any more power, but you do get a keener throttle response and you can program the car to make the suspension and steering adjust to your personal taste and driving style.
The ride is sufficiently compliant to make the M3 Saloon a perfectly usable everyday car, especially if you go for the optional Electronic Damper Control (EDC), which allows you to switch between different settings.
The car also handles very well, but despite having a hydraulically assisted set-up, the steering still doesn't have that sense of feedback that a driver needs in order to have total confidence in what exactly the tyres are doing.
So the M3 Saloon is very accomplished and very fast. However, it does lack a certain je ne sais quoi in the excitement stakes - which is fine if you look at it as a hot four-door saloon, but could prove to be a disappointment if you're a fan of the M car heritage.
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wrote on 08 10 2007