RECENT ARTICLES
Shell Fill-Up Friday Winner: Doug Broussard!
Congratulations to this week’s Shell Fill-Up Friday winner, Golden Gate Chapter member Doug Broussard, who won a $50 Shell gift card thanks to this picture of his M2 filling up at Shell! “This 2018 M2 with executive package came to me by way of the same friend who sold...
2 Series Gran Coupé Price Comparison
The new BMW 2 Series four-door has yet to have its official market introduction here in the U.S., but its configurator has gone live on BMWUSA.com. To refresh everyone’s memory, the 2 Series Gran Coupé is BMW’s latest entry-level effort. Beat to the market years earlier by the likes...
BMW Committed To Internal Combustion Until 2050
BMW plans to manufacture and sell internal combustion engines for another 30 years, or until roughly 2050. The word comes from research-and-development chief Klaus Fröhlich, who sat down with Automotive News Europe for an interview that was published last week. BMW, like many other automakers, is having to plan...
N63 Oil-Consumption Litigation Update
The story isn’t over yet, as far as the N63 V8 and its propensity to consume oil is concerned. After settling one major lawsuit related to the matter in 2018, it would be just a matter of months until another suit was filed, citing similar problems but with different...
Bosch Reimagines The Sun Visor
Sun visors are something nearly every car has. Although they serve the same purpose, they’re almost always different from car to car, and especially in the grand scheme of things from full-size trucks to roadsters. While the entire automobile has generationally transformed around us, sun visors have remained a...
BMW Restomod Meets Motorrad: The NMoto Nostalgia
Art Deco is back, and this time it’s on two wheels. Today’s emphasis on technology, research, and development has made us so keen on propelling the automotive industry into the future, but what happens when we want to take a minute or two to savor the past? Four-wheel bimmer...
Club Racing Announces 2019 Champs And Award Winners
Tire Rack BMW CCA Club Racing Series chairman Shaun McKenzie has announced the series’ 2019 championships and awards.The series awarded national championships in twelve classes in 2019; four of the 2019 champions had won in 2018. The winners, listed in descending order of class size, were: • David LeBlanc...
MINI Dominates Dakar With Five Stages Remaining
Carlos Sainz and his co-driver Lucas Cruz in the #305 MINI JCW Buggy won the seventh stage of the 2020 Dakar in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, January 12. It was the third stage win for Sainz and Cruz and the sixth for MINI. With five stages remaining, Sainz and...
Scrubbing Hampton, Revisited
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece describing how Hampton, the 48,000-mile ’73 2002 I bought in September, had thick black undercoating sprayed all around the engine compartment, initially making me think that perhaps the front end had been smacked and the undercoating was covering up the signs...
Shell Fill-Up Friday Winner: Kevin Broughton!
Congratulations to this week’s Shell Fill-Up Friday winner, New Jersey Chapter member Kevin Broughton, who won a $50 Shell gift card thanks to this picture of his M340i filling up at Shell! “This picture was taken after not driving my M340i xDrive (Dravit Grey over Cognac) for two weeks,”...
No U.S.-Spec M Touring? The Longroof Community Will Fix That
My first car doubled as the family wagon—it was a 2006 VW Passat, with a punchy 200-horsepower turbocharged inline four. Sure, it couldn’t compare to the R36 Variant—a 300-horsepower, 4-Motion all-wheel-drive, three-pedal performance iteration of my beloved Passat—but I loved that hunk of German metal regardless, even if it...
Car And Driver Compares Alfa Giulia To G20 330i
50 years ago, BMW and Alfa Romeo were helping to invent the sport sedan segment. Today they’re both still at it, Alfa Romeo having stuck with the Giulia name, and BMW now offering the seventh generation of the 3 Series, which followed up on the success of the 2002...
Optimizing Mobility: i3 Urban Suite To Debut At CES 2020
The world of BMW is ever-changing, and a recent project from Munich has laid the foundation for the brand’s new perspective of the future. The luxury automaker has shown us in recent months that while the current trend of the automotive industry favors electrified and even automated transportation, BMW’s...
BMW, Daimler Withdraw From North American Car-Sharing
The story isn’t over just yet for BMW and Daimler, and their struggles in car-sharing and the overarching mobility sector. The latest news is that the joint effort between both companies, which came together just last year, is withdrawing all of its car-sharing efforts in the U.S., while additional cuts...
The Case For The Unloved Hatch
There are certain cars that are both loved and hated by true car enthusiasts. The Nissan Cube springs to mind; some loved the practicality and quirkiness that the Cube offered, and some just couldn’t get over the asymmetrical styling features. Even while Tesla outsells its competition, it still maintains...
BMW Says Customers Want Massive Kidney Grilles
You want your next BMW to have massive kidney grilles, according to the company itself—and a designer for them, Peter Henrich, has gone as far as to say the new bold styling has been “crucial for success.” You can read the finer points in the actual interview here, but...
EV Tech Isn’t Ready For M-Car Primetime
BMW M purists have long been skeptical of the installation of electric technology into their beloved high-performance machines, but it looks like we will have more time to adapt to the way of the future than we initially thought. With the upcoming debut of iNext in 2021, and the...
BMW Is Most Searched Auto Brand Of Holiday Season
The way people shop for almost everything they buy these days is primarily online, and when it comes to learning about your next vehicle, it usually starts with a search. According to SEMrush, an internet marketing research tool that has made a name for itself in the data and...
Five BMWs To Watch: Hagerty At O’Fest
The strong appreciation and re-valuing of a handful of BMW M cars over the past several years took many of us by surprise. Not so long ago—we were using craigslist, after all—E30 M3s and E28 M5s could be had for a fraction of what clean, sorted, and low-mileage examples...
Off-Season Washing Made Easy With Griot’s Garage
Even living in California, the winter is the worst time of the year in terms of the cleanliness of my vehicles. Whether it’s rain that happens just often enough to prevent washing the previous rainstorm off, or the evening dew that soaks my street-parked E30 each night, as long...
B58 In M340i Wins Best Engine Award
We don’t need to tell you that BMW makes an incredible inline six-cylinder engine. The automaker has been doing so almost continuously for the greater part of a century, and they’ve only gotten better with the march of time and evolution of technology. While the N55 appeared on the...
Report: i3 Production Extended To 2024
According to a recent article by BMWBlog, production of the i3, which arrived in 2013 for the 2014 model year, has been extended to go all the way until 2024. Last week, we wrote about how regularly updating the batteries of the i3 have allowed it to gain a significant...
Rad Gear, Rad Cars At Radwood SoCal
Fashion trends tend to repeat themselves, but attendees of the 1980-1999 car culture movement Radwood pride themselves in ensuring nothing at the show could be mistaken for contemporary—and the result is like no other car show in the country. While the Radwood movement has ballooned from a single event...
BMW’s New Top-Of-The-Line Customer Race Car Will Be An M4 GT3
BMW has announced that it will produce an M4 GT3 as a successor to its current top-of-the-line customer race car, the M6 GT3. The new car will be based on the next-generation M4. BMW presently produces two race cars based on the current M4, the M4 DTM and the...
BMW Commits To Low-Emissions Shipping Vessels
BMW is one of the most innovative automakers in the industry, and the groundbreaking mentality extends far beyond the conception and production of vehicles. From design to technology with countless other examples in between, BMW has made a name for itself in numerous realms outside of the automotive world....
Scrubbing Hampton, Revisited
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece describing how Hampton, the 48,000-mile ’73 2002 I bought in September, had thick black undercoating sprayed all around the engine compartment, initially making me think that perhaps the front end had been smacked and the undercoating was covering up the signs...
A Vintage Ignition System Primer
The final book I wrote while I worked at Bentley Publishers was Mechanical Ignition Handbook: The Hack Mechanic Guide To Vintage Ignition Systems. It sort of slipped under the radar, as it was released after I left Bentley. Coincidentally, its release date was within a couple of weeks of...
My Lack Of Isetta Lust Is Threatening My Marriage
My wife Maire Anne and I are remarkably compatible. We love one another. and throughout our 41-year relationship and 35-year marriage, we have supported each other’s passions, odd though some of them may have been. And yet, a danger looms. It’s the storm on the horizon that threatens to...
The Rhythm Of A Winter Project
Two weeks ago, in The Return Of The Electric Slide, I wrote about shoehorning four cars into my garage. I explained that on the positive side, I got four cars not only safely tucked out of the elements, but into an attached garage where I could easily work on...
Scrubbing Hampton
There’s an episode of the animated TV show Archer where Sterling Archer is stranded in a freight-train boxcar with his mother’s Cadillac-salesman boyfriend Ron, who, surprisingly, has a briefcase full of cash. It turns out that Ron is a far more interesting character than he initially appears to be;...
The Return Of The Electric Slide
When my garage was built fourteen years ago, it was an exercise in what was possible. The City of Newton had shot down my free-standing-garage proposal because it impinged on the rule of a four-foot setback. The 31′-by-17′ attached garage was the largest structure that I could build and...
