BMW 3-Series 50 Years
by Tony Lewin
“And, of course, I cannot possibly forget the patience and tolerance of all who surround me here at BMW Book Central. For putting up with everything from blockade-height stacks of reference books to a teetering tower of papers and notebooks, crack-of-dawn departures to catch key interviewees, and the inevitable mood swings depending on how things were going.”
We normally start a review with a salient excerpt that establishes the topic’s virtues but in this case we’re going with one that establishes the author’s. You can’t help but smile reading the above paragraph in the Acknowledgements. If you already have BMW books on the shelf, chances are some of them have Lewin’s byline (he’s also written quite a pile of other car books). And he not only works out of “BMW Book Central,” he’s also got a BMW in the garage. In other words, he has a frame of reference, and skin in the game, and you will profit from it. If there is through-line to this book it’s that the 3-Series is fun, to which we will add that this book is fun!
BMW’s home turf is Bavaria, so the lederhosen make sense! Incidentally, a 3-Series model, the 318i, was the first BMW to be built in North America, and that plant went on to become the firm’s biggest in the world.
No reason to worry about all this black—you practically have to dip your fingers in vaseline to produce a smudge.
If despite seeing 3-Series BMWs on the road for half a century you still have never given them a second look, consider that over 20 million have been sold so somebody must be on to something. Which is why the very first paragraph in this book is: “The 3-Series is BMW. Nothing less. If there is a single most universally recognized BMW, it’s the Three.” If you thought the 2002 (or 1602) deserved that plaudit, you’re near the mark because it was the immediate predecessor to the 3-Series.
This book doesn’t just present 50 years of this “hero model that put the company back firmly on its feet after the Neue Klasse and ’02 series had rescued it from its near-drowning in the early ‘60s” but it comes at just the time when the current generation, the 7th, is about to be succeeded by a new one.
While the book singles out the 3-Series it begins, for the sake of context, much earlier, with an opening chapter suitably titled “The Spark of Genius.” This is preceded by a foldout tripartite timeline (above), a fancy print feature belying the book’s small price. Lewin examines all the factors that guided BMW’s thinking in regards to product choice and market segment—sporty but not a Porsche, upscale but not a Mercedes, and thus more attainable than either—all of which bring home the point that the “brand suddenly found its products being paraded as fashion accessories for a glitzy city lifestyle.”
There is a good Index—this is a Quarto book after all—but the several dozen entries under “Specs” deserve special applause because they are uncommonly finely parsed. The narrative itself remains, despite dispensing a lot of facts, cohesive and engaging because specs and data are pulled into tables of various kinds throughout (example above). The same treatment applies to ancillary topics that would interupt the flow of the main story so for each variant there are “Design Up Close” and “Motorsports” sidebars, even remarks about collectability. Readers who find themselves reaching for the classifieds after reading this book will be pleased to learn that “the fact that its models are not yet seen as investor’s cars could be a blessing in disguise.”
Lest there be confusion with a different title, the same author wrote (2021) for the same publisher
Copyright 2025, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info).
RSS Feed - Comments
Phone / Mail / Email
RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter