We don’t have to complain about a lack of attention. As soon as we park the station wagon painted in “São Paolo Yellow”, four thumbs up are given to us. That in itself is nothing unusual. The products of Bayerische Motorenwerke have many fans. But when the expression of sympathy comes from a Mercedes AMG C 63 S station wagon, things take on a completely different colour. Especially since the Schwaben Pfeil is the classic powerhouse variant with a befitting eight-cylinder engine. Our BMW has two pots less under the bonnet, puts it on par with 375 kW / 510 hp on the data sheet. Connoisseurs now know in which car we are sitting. Right in the BMW M3 Competition Touring xDrive.
A station wagon that is available for the first time in the 51-year history of M GmbH. I’m sorry, what? Yes you’ve read correctly. Only now is the bread-and-butter family truck also available in the power version. The reason was that the BMW managers are of the opinion that an all-wheel drive is part of an M3 Touring and that this could only be implemented with compromises so far. They don’t do things by halves in the Munich dynamic division. Reason enough to take a closer look at this M3 in everyday life. Of course, there was also a sprint stage on a surprisingly almost empty stretch of motorway. We were really impressed by the directional stability and the ease with which you drive fast.
This also applies to carving on country roads. Nobody can beat the BMW M3 Touring in a hurry. The keyword is fast. The speed at which the power-wagon rips through corners with little to no trouble for the driver is impressive. The commitment with which the M3 Touring conveys to the driver every change of direction as an opportunity to show what they can do only increases the driving pleasure. You have to be very strong in character in order not to run the risk of becoming a well-known personality in a certain Flensburg file. It’s a lot of fun to trim the M3 Touring exactly to your liking using the wide range of tuning options. However, the dynamic arts are also bought with a correspondingly taut chassis, which is not so tough that the integrity of the intervertebral discs is in danger, but a family station wagon, with which one drives daily on the rumble streets of German inner cities, springs more comfortably.
But if you want to go on holiday as quickly as possible on well-developed long-distance routes, the Touring with its trunk volume of 500 to 1,510 liters is suitable as a fast luggage and passenger transporter. After all, the M3 Competition Touring xDrive manages 250 km/h, unlocked it is even 280 km/h. The Munich station wagon is also good at sprinting from a standing start to 100 km/h with a time of 3.6 seconds, but cannot hide a slight acceleration weakness at speeds below 2,800 rpm. If you fully exploit the potential of the station wagon, the fuel consumption logically increases, well above the 10.4 liters per 100 kilometers specified by BMW. During our test drives we came up with a value of 12.7 l/100 km, but in between we were also M-compliant on the road.
The BMW M3 Competition Touring xDrive does not necessarily make you popular in the neighborhood, since the flaps of the sports exhaust are open every time the powerful six-cylinder is started and the noise is correspondingly high. The locks are only closed when you press the corresponding button in the center console. When maneuvering the BMW M3 Competition Touring, you have to be careful not to scratch the rims anyway, as there is no 360-degree camera due to the aerodynamic shape of the exterior mirrors. A classic reversing camera is on board and in combination with the right-hand side mirror, which automatically folds down as soon as you select automatic gear “R”, rim-killing curbs can be avoided.
The camera also helps with the view directly to the rear, since the rear window, which is not large anyway, is partially covered by the trunk roller blind as soon as the cover is not open. Even the uncomplicated jumping out of the car when you have to go to a shop quickly is not feasible without practice with the extremely comfortable carbon seat shells that were installed in our test car. The reason is the side cheeks on the leg rests, which first have to be overcome. The infotainment system, consisting of the 12.3-inch instrument display and the 14.9-inch touchscreen, is easy to operate after a short period of familiarization. The voice control in particular works well, as does the integration of the smartphone via Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Sounds like a lot of everyday fun. It is. However, at least 97,800 euros must be in the bank account. Our test car costs 124,560 euros.
