I've Started Looking At BMW E30s Again: Please Send Help

The BMW E30 is one of my favourite cars ever, and I've started looking at buying a Touring, despite no money nor space. Please send help!

Alex Kersten

09 Jan 2019

I've Started Looking At BMW E30s Again: Please Send Help

The car you see in the grainy image above is my old BMW E30. It started life as a 318i automatic, but when I bought it in 2009, the engine and gearbox had been swapped to a manual 325i. The car was ropey at best, had the heaviest clutch known to man and hid its rust well, but I bloody loved it.

It was cool, had retro styling, was simple to work on and, at the time, was cheap to buy. In fact, I paid £850 for this one, and insurance as a 25-year-old MA Automotive Journalism university student was pretty affordable. Speaking of being at university, I split my final project into two parts: half written/half video because the thought of writing 12,000 words killed me. So I made this…

It’s clear, then, that I’ve always had a thing for E30s, so you’ll understand how much it hurt when I was forced to sell mine in 2011 because my first proper job at Autocar meant that I had my very own long-term Kia Picanto test car.

Well, guess what…over five years have passed and I’ve started looking at E30s again despite having no space on my driveway. (The car port I recently built is reserved for Phil, my V6 MX-5, which has recently been fully resprayed in Mazda’s delicious Soul Red colour).

I want a classic BMW again, and this time it’s a Touring I’m after. I don’t even care if it has six cylinders; so long as it moves under it’s own steam, count me in!

Except don’t count me in…because I don’t have the space and prices of these awesome little cars have skyrocketed. I mean, £6995 for a 325i Touring like this one is strong money. Then again, how about that £60,000 325iX I showed you earlier in the week?

So please do me a favour and tell me why I need to stop looking for one (or send me links to cheap ones you find so that I can fulfill my deepest desire!).

Yeah, you see my problem…

Comments

Hola Alex

E30s are great. However, considering what you already own(MX-5/E36/RX-8), you already have what makes an E30 special in at least one of your cars. I feel weird trying to deter you from an E30, but realistically they’re too expensive to be a beater and require too much work to be another one of your projects. If you really want one, wait until you find a good one for cheap and jump on it. The deals are out there, but I would wait until one comes up.

Memories are always sweeter than reality. Drive someone else’s E30 and see if it’s still what you want. You could drive mine, but I live in the U.S.

E28s are nicer, there saved you from an E30

(PS BUY AN E28)

Just 12k words?

Maybe you should invest in a property with more land space for more cars then only get the E30?

It won’t give you anything new, especially the touring. It will be cool for the first couple of weeks/months but then the reality will hit you really hard. E30 was cool because it was affordable fun. As soon as you start thinking about costs, diminishing value and stuff like that the fun is gone. And it’s not only that you may decide in the very beginning that you’ll ignore costs but you can’t ignore how rare the parts are at the moment. You’ll always have it on the back of your mind.