BMW

Ford, Honda, and BMW have announced plans to create a new “vehicle-to-grid company” that’s aimed at standardizing vehicle charging via a singular platform. The service also seeks to return excess energy to the electrical grid, effectively converting EVs into publicly shared batteries.

The business will be known as ChargeScape and, according to the automakers' press release, seeks to “create a single platform that will seamlessly connect electric utilities, automakers and their interested EV customers to manage energy usage for a broad pool of EVs.” The scheme could be one way of addressing concerns that modern power grids couldn’t endure widespread electric vehicle usage while helping to position the involved companies in an industry that’s being heavily incentivized by the government.

Automakers and companies of all types frequently survey their customers to develop ideas for new products and get feedback on existing items. But while that information is valuable and should be considered when creating new products, some companies seem to bypass the process altogether and end up rolling out something unexpected. Apple did a great job of that with the iPhone, creating a whole world of new products that people didn’t know they needed, but BMW didn’t have the same luck when it made the move to package popular vehicle features in added-cost subscription services. Though it’s not ditching the controversial practice altogether, BMW walked back the heated seat subscription after receiving scathing feedback from customers.

Maybe I need to reconsider these newfangled “Sports Utility Vehicles” and their “crossover” brethren. They have, seemingly overnight, become surprisingly popular - in one unscientific study, I’m estimating that these two related subgenres of tall wagons work out to roughly 74 out of every 20 cars on the road.

If you’re wondering why I’m a writer today and not the mechanical engineer I aspired to be when I was 15, you can look at the above statement as well as my failure in high-school AP Calculus for an answer. 

Anyhow, it seems these things aren’t going anywhere. They keep growing larger and taller, Tower of Babel-ing their way upward so drivers can see the traffic signal ahead as they sit, ever idling in traffic surrounded by their ilk. So we must acknowledge their presence and even admit their suitability for certain drivers and their needs. The 2023 BMW X7 M60i xDrive you see before you is one of those which, by function of cost and size, must only fit a relatively few - but who is that driver? 

For decades, enthusiasts have known the M badge from BMW. M stands for motorsport, and indeed it was once a separate division within the company that produced both cars for racing and hot street cars. But the M badge had two meanings - and, for much of the lineup, still does. Here’s the decoder ring.

As a general rule, my biggest recent beef with BMW sedans has been that they feel a bit heavy and porky. A tad ponderous. Not so much that I’d eliminate them from my shopping list (in the fantasy world where an automotive journalist actually can afford a car in this class), but enough to notice.

As George Costanza once said, "there's still a little summer left." So if a drop-top appeals to you and you want one before the snow flies, this 2004 BMW 330ci convertible could be for you. Or you could live in Southern California or Florida and just have summer all the time.

Today we feature a Bimmer of recent vintage that appears to be in good shape. It also warms our enthusiast hearts that this 2013 BMW 335i M-Sport has a six-speed manual transmission.

BMW has been teasing the next-generation M5, specifically the long-roof wagon variant known as the M5 Touring.

This is a little odd. While European sport wagons were once relatively popular in the United States, it has become increasingly rare to see them migrating beyond the home market. But there are rumors that the be-hatched M5 will be sold stateside, enthralling automotive enthusiasts that we can only hope are genuinely interested in buying a few.

Today's UCOTD comes from my backyard (well, sort of -- it's within the metro but a bit of a trek). This Chicago-area 2008 BMW M5 with a manual (!) has belonged to the seller since 2016, when he or she brought it up from Dallas.

In the “old days,” you had two transmission options if you wanted to buy a car. More often than not, a manual transmission was the standard choice, but buyers increasingly had automatic transmission options. Then, ‘ze Germans started using dual-clutch transmissions in racing cars, leading to the array of the gearboxes seen on the market today. That’s about to change for BMW, at least, as the company’s M division head of development told Top Gear that the DCT would die as it shifted to electrification.

Today's used car is a California-based 1993 BMW 318is that is being restored.

Score one for the vanishingly few people who still prefer a sedan over an SUV (read: just about everyone working here). BMW has introduced a new 5 Series sedan, one which will be available either as a gasser or an EV when it goes on sale later this year.

BMW introduced the Concept Touring Coupe at the 2023 Villa d'Este Concorso d'Eleganza in Italy. Clearly intended to be a throwback to the convertible M Coupes of the past, the design has metamorphosed the current-generation Z into a shooting brake.

When I first became a wise and fair judge for the 24 Hours of Lemons race series, back in 2008, I got a lot of static from Internet Car Experts who noted the large quantity of BMW E30s in every race and proclaimed that any E30 in any condition was worth at least ten times more than the Lemons $500 limit on car cost. Because I spent a great deal of time in self-service junkyards and saw that—at least in California—such places were overflowing with unwanted E30s, I knew they were wrong. 15 years later, though, E30s have become fairly rare in junkyards, so this fairly complete 325es in a Colorado yard caught my eye a few weeks back.

Though it’s been several years since the first problems were reported, we’re still feeling the effects of the massive Takata airbag recall. B MW recently issued a “do not drive” warning to owners of its older vehicles over concerns about their airbags, adding to the list of automakers still recalling vehicles.

Remember that old Price is Right game in which the contestant would blindly reach into a bag and haul out numbers (or strikes) in an effort to guess the price of a car? It increasingly seems like that’s the tack for BMW’s naming system, particularly with some of their newer models – such as the just-announced i7 M70 xDrive.

Today's used car of the day is a 2003 BMW 325ci coupe.

It's wagon time yet again. This time it's a 3-Series wagon of 2004 vintage.

This 2004 BMW 325 XiT wagon has an automatic transmission and is a daily driver, so the mileage is over 191,000 and rising.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

BMW i4 forum members are calling the Kia EV9 ugly.

Takes a large grille to know one, huh?

While BMW anticipates that half of its total sales will stem from electric vehicles by 2030, it recently announced that hydrogen power is still on the table. In fact, the German brand has suggested that it may even bring one to market in a few years.

It's spring, the weather is getting nicer, so I figured why not feature a convertible today?

This one is a 2003 BMW M3, and it's a stick.

Today's used car of the day is a six-speed manual BMW that comes at a dear price.

Today's used car of the day is one of just 508 ever built. Yet it's priced by the seller at a reasonable $45,000.

Picture it. Last Tuesday, late afternoon. Checking the used convertible listings like I’d been doing for some time, it seemed the right car would never materialize. But on that particular afternoon, I happened to check Facebook Marketplace, a terrible place to search listings which I generally avoided. The default 249-mile search radius showed me a particular convertible I hadn’t seen listed before. Turned out it was the one.

Venerable consumer-oriented publication Consumer Reports has its 2023 Brand Scorecard out. BMW topped it.

Remember when the BMW 3-Series was considered the almost perfect sports sedan? Pepperidge Farm remembers. And so do I. This E46 2002 BMW 330i is also a reminder.

Last week, BMW Group CEO Oliver Zipse reportedly claimed that political agendas would not influence its electrification plans. Though the entire discussion was prompted by exactly that, forcing the automaker to address supply chain logistics that likely prohibited it from qualifying for the United States' rejiggered EV subsidy scheme. 

BMW, one of the companies that kicked off the exceptionally annoying trend of in-vehicle subscription features, now says it won’t follow rival Mercedes-Benz in offering added-cost power upgrades for some vehicles. 

On Wednesday, BMW revealed the color-changing i Vision Dee concept during its keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023 held in Las Vegas – showcasing a bevy of novel technologies the automaker would like to see installed into its future products. While some of these seemed grounded in reality, with the Bavarian brand’s chairman already confirming their implementation on its forthcoming “Neue Klasse” vehicle platform, others items were so fantastical that it would be difficult to imagine them making it to production vehicles.

Automotive technology is developing at a dizzying pace, but that rapid progress has created quite a few side effects along the way. Take screens, for example. It’s illegal to even hold a cell phone while driving in many states, yet there’s a large screen on the dash of almost every new car today – sometimes more than one. BMW’s board chair has thoughts on the issue and believes we’ll see a big shift in how screens are used in the next few years.

Hi Cary,

I have a question for you about some maintenance on an older BMW I recently bought. The car is an E30 325i and I was told that it needs to have a valve adjustment. I am new to having an older car as everything I have owned prior has been much newer. Any advice on it and what to keep an eye out for?

Thank you for any information.

Ronnie

Today's used car of the day comes from the Illinois side of the St. Louis suburbs. It's a 2008 BMW M5 in the rare Interlagos Blue paint. It also has the Sepang Bronze Merino perforated leather interior trim and full interior leather package.

Happy holidays! Happy new year! Welcome to 2023! Now fork over more for that BMW you want.

Climate-change protesters doused a car painted by Andy Warhol in flour in Milan, Italy, last week.

BMW Chief Executive Oliver Zipse has said that despite the automaker’s status as a luxury carmaker it would not be abandoning lower-priced segments while it swaps over to electric vehicles. Though the general trajectory for the Bavarian marquee – and the automotive industry in general – over the last several years has been to chase higher margins by focusing on pricier, often larger, vehicles and clever packaging.

Today's UCOTD is a hopped-up Bimmer.

Amazon Web Services and BMW are reportedly joining forces to establish a new cloud-based software designed to deliver and manage the data amassed by connected vehicles – which is great news if you happen not to value your privacy.

As the industry rockets towards a future eventually denuded of internal combustion, it’s encouraging to know at least some things retain a few traditional enthusiast roots. Witness the new 2023 BMW M2, packing an inline six-cylinder engine and three pedals.

Dieselgate slashed a gaping hole in the assumption that automakers were genuinely invested in building more efficient cars, but it’s hardly the only flimflammery going on behind the scenes. A recent report from Transport and Environment, a European NGO pushing for cleaner transport, found that many automakers are underreporting global emissions by as much as 115 percent. 

Recently, Dodge made news by saying its beloved V8 performance cars are going full EV in the not-too-distant future. BMW is talking about a similar transition.

You thought microtransactions were just about charging people to play games. Think again.

Almost every automotive journalist and enthusiast I know hates the new BMW grille – the one that took the twin-kidney look and made it as bucktooth as a beaver.

Is it possible to be both overwhelmed and underwhelmed? Does the whelming up and down cancel itself out, leaving one with just the right amount of whelm? Or is there some sort of exponential curve, resulting in either a surplus or deficit of whelmification?

The red squiggly lines provided by the good people behind Microsoft Word tell me that I’m stretching the bounds of both language and reason here – but reason may not have been in the room when the folks in Munich plotted this 2022 BMW M8 Competition Gran Coupe. Heck, we can quibble on the language there, too, when considering the traditional definition of a coupe. But looking at the specs and the window sticker can lead one to conclusions that are occasionally not delivered upon slipping behind the wheel, thus leading to my conundrum.

BMW just released prices for its 2023 lineup and prices are up across the board, with the M-series high-performance vehicles getting even heftier increases.

As a fan of the midsize luxury sedan class, it’s sad to see how many manufacturers have given up on the segment. The German trio still has their stalwarts, but Japan gave up in 2020 (RIP Lexus GS), the only American still in the ring is the Cadillac CT5, and its outlier status is accompanied by newcomer Genesis with the G80.

It’s a dying class, which is why your author was especially pleased to spend the Memorial Day weekend with a longstanding headliner of the German luxury sedan genre: A 2021 BMW 5-Series.

Earlier reports that the BMW i4 would ship without Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, with the smartphone-mirroring systems set to be installed via over-the-air updates at a later time, appear to be incorrect.

BMW and Mercedes-Benz are dumping ShareNow — their jointly managed car-sharing businesses — and Stellantis will reportedly become the recipient. Effectively a merger of BMW’s DriveNow and Mercedes’ (technically Daimler AG’s) slurry of similar services that were rolled into car2go, ShareNow’s individual components have spent the last decade trying to figure out which markets would embrace app-based, roadside rentals charging by the minute and which would reject it.

While it never managed to reach the notoriety of the Mercedes S-Class, BMW’s 7 Series has long been a popular alternative for well-dressed henchmen in action movies. There have even been periods where the Bimmer came pretty close to matching Daimler’s flagship sedan in terms of sales. But BMW’s decision to take what was effectively a well-appointed sports sedan and reform it into a limousine with an optional 601-horsepower V12 seems to have backfired.

The 7 Series is allegedly getting more in touch with its roots for the seventh generation (G70/G71) model and throwing in the all-electric i7 for good measure. However, the resulting automobile still looks to be following the lead of the Mercedes, rather than focusing on being the “ultimate driving machine” of yore. Meanwhile, BMW is pulling out all the stops in terms of styling and is throwing down every modern technology at its disposal.

Pour one out for the twelve-cylinder BMW, folks. The car company has just announced its final run of M760i xDrive vehicles, fitted with what BMW is calling the very last V12 engine ever to be fitted to a BMW series production road vehicle. The party comes to a halt in June.

While we’re sure the vast majority of our readers think of Ponch and Jon when they hear the word ‘chips’, there’s no denying the world’s automakers would probably rather never hear the term again as it relates to car parts. After weathering a severe shortage of the things, BMW thinks it has a solution: Shacking up with a semiconductor manufacturer and a semiconductor foundry.

It’s been decades since BMW introduced a dedicated M car, so imagine our surprise when we learned the next one would be a boxy SUV. Considering the last standalone M was the ground-hugging wedge that was the M1 coupe, we have to assume M Division engineers were either trying to challenge themselves or someone higher up figured they could make more money selling a utility vehicle.

While just a concept at present, the BMW XM boasts a fairly radical design. But the manufacturer has claimed it will retain over 90 percent of the prototype’s good (?) looks when it enters into production. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here that might make it into the finished product, including the extra-thin daytime running lights that sit atop the real headlamps that have been snuck behind tinted glass. It’s a strange beast that doesn’t seem like it’s targeting the traditional M shopper and, according to BMW, that’s because it isn’t.

BMW is dusting off one of its older logos for select vehicles and a bevy of vintage colors to celebrate the M Division’s 50th anniversary. Those with a functional memory will recall that the brand streamlined its corporate iconography in 2020, making its already basic logo flatter and less colorful than ever before. It was a monumental achievement focused on helping the image come across better electronic screens that have been in existence since 1927, began supplanting printed office memos in the 1980s, and have evolved to support the kind of graphical clarity that now rivals your own eyes. The automaker also claimed the bare-bones logo stood for “openness and clarity” and would be used primarily for marketing and official communications — rather than occupying valuable hood real estate.

The new celebratory emblem — used during the 1970s and 80s on the occasional BMW Motorsport product — will be permitted to adorn the sheet metal, however. You simply have to purchase an M vehicle, ask for it to be adorned with the retro iconography, and then pay some extra money.

BMW has become a bit of a wild card. From confusing naming conventions to controversial styling decisions, the Bavarian automaker has become no stranger to various forms of ridicule lately, particularly from the enthusiast set. With a rich performance history on and off of the track, the company has amassed a fervent fanbase that’s somehow both stuck in the past and impatient for the future.

They cite classics like the E30 M3 and E39 M5 with rose-tinted nostalgia and wonder why BMW can’t capture lightning in a bottle again – while also adding the performance, technology, safety, and comfort that they’ve come to expect, of course. And never mind the fact that the BMW Group reported record-breaking sales numbers in the first quarter of this year while largely ignoring the peanut gallery.

Once again, the #savethemanuals crowd weeps. And with good reason — the BMW 2-Series, which I remember being quite wonderful to drive the last time I piloted one (it’s been a few years) — will be going automatic only.

That’s not the only change. It’s longer, lower, wider, and the styling is refreshed.

Today’s Rare Ride is a one-off bespoke build of an already very limited-run car. A 2000 7-Series BMW was not enough for one Mr. Lagerfeld, so he sat down with BMW Individual to work his car into something very special.

The result was intense Germanic luxury with a heavy helping of Regency Elite. Let’s go.

BMW has proclaimed the 2022 M5 CS Sedan, with 627 horsepower and 553 lb-ft of torque, to be the quickest and most powerful BMW production vehicle ever produced, with a claimed 0-60 time of 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 190 MPH. It will arrive in the U.S. in the second half of 2021.

BMW published a four-minute and change ad a couple weeks ago for the start of the virtual CES 2021 show. Though this would not normally be a subject worth covering, this particular ad seems to indicate BMW believes their own E65 7-Series is for ridiculous out of touch Boomers.

Marketing departments always know what they’re doing, right?

Ridiculousness is a word – I checked. And it describes the vehicle I am about to tell y’all about perfectly.

Ya see, the BMW X5 M Competition is a perfectly fine luxury crossover that BMW decided needed a bit more spice. Never mind that the X5 has generally been one of the sportier of the lot (sporty being a relative term when applied to these types of vehicles, of course).

BMW videos on YouTube accessed by more than one million subscribers have earned the German automaker a coveted Golden Button Award.