1987 BMW 325i Convertible Tested: Serious Frivolity

From the October 1987 issue of Car and Driver.

The Bavarian Motor Works is tuned to its market. There you are, boulevarding along in your Bimmer, its top down, sun­shine on your shoulders, listening to something suitably refined on the BMW anti-theft radio. Touch the “Band” button.

No, not to receive oompah music from a Munich Bierstube, but to see orange digits reading “WB” and hear:” . . . and out 30 miles, wind west-southwest at twelve knots, visibility seven, seas four feet . . . ”

It’s marine weather! The radio can pick up a third broadcast band, the set of seven channels from 162.400 to 162.550 MHz that carry local meteorological reports from the National Oceanic and Atmo­spheric Administration.

What a perfect yuppiemobile. Swan­ning around town in your $31,000 con­vertible, you can keep up on the latest yachting forecasts.

Everybody should own a convertible at least once in his life. However, everybody who’s wanted to own a convertible with a whirling-propeller emblem, new and factory-made, hasn’t been able to for 28 years. The last chance was the two-seat 507, made from 1956 to 1959 in very small numbers. True, the outside coach­builder Baur has been chopping the tops off 2002 and 3-series BMWs for years, but not many of them, and not for the United States. Time, said BMW, to put matters right.

BMW is serious about “right.” Unlike many open cars, its convertible does not start life as a sedan. No decapitation is suf­fered. BMW builds the 325i convertible as a drophead from the Dingolfing factory floor up. Stiffening sheetmetal is added to the doorsills, the floor, and the front strut towers; the compartment behind the back seat that stores the folded top also ties into the rear spring mounts to contribute to the chassis’s stiffness. As a result of these and similar measures, the open car weighs only 160 pounds more than a comparably equipped 325is two-door.

Comparably equipped is comprehen­sively equipped. The convertible, in fact, is more or less a combination of the 325i and the 325is, with some of the luxury ap­pointments of the former and some of the sportier bits of the latter. Even a partial list reads like the contents of a Christmas stocking: 168-hp, 2494 cc SOHC six-cylin­der engine; anti-lock brakes; gas-pressure shocks; alloy wheels; V-rated tires; leather upholstery; front seats with adjustable thigh support and front height; multifunc­tion computer; eight-speaker sound sys­tem; BMW’s service indicator . . .

Listen. The cassette deck keeps track of how long it’s run, and every fifteen hours it beeps at you a reminder that it’s time to use the head-cleaning device. Which is supplied, gratis, in the glove box.

Another thing you get for your 31 Gs is a top that is very easy to raise and lower, even though doing so is an entirely man­ual operation. The cloth roof folds away under a neat, completely flush metal cov­er, leaving the clean (if rather bricklike) beltline unbulged. One rear passenger place is lost to the top, but the two that re­main are roomy and comfortable.

You can feel the convertible’s slight weight disadvantage, especially if you’ve ordered the automatic-transmission op­tion: its shift points and kickdown switches seem to make a poor marriage with the engine’s torque curve. Yes, you can manual­ly cycle the box through all four ratios, and rather briskly, too. But a four-seat convertible is by nature a lazy car; you don’t normally keep one on the balls of its feet. With the automatic, you keep think­ing, “Sweet engine, but too small.”

With the manual transmission, less is lost. In C/D testing the five-speed con­vertible was only 0.3 second slower than the 325is from zero to 60, only 0.1 second and 1 mph behind in the quarter-mile, and only one foot out front at the end of a stop from 70 mph. The 131-mph top speed of the five-speed convertible was actually 3 mph higher than that of the five-speed se­dan, but the difference is well within the range of production variability.

Back to the lazy mode. Simply ghosting along, not a competitive corpuscle aquiv­er in your body, is a delightful way to drive this car. Wind protection is so good even when all the windows are down (they’re electric, of course) that your hat might just stay on, if you dare wear it. The seats­, well, you could do the One Lap in these seats and love every endless hour of it. The ride is excellent under all conditions, the suspension having been beefed just enough to carry the extra weight. The shocks damp out everything thrown at them. The steering is especially fine, light but with feel; BMW’s is one of the few power systems that cannot be “beaten” by the quickest moves. When you start to ex­ercise the steering through the curves, you find the tires and the springs take the added load in stride; and though the car doesn’t actually feel as if it wants to run hard, it retains its integrity when you insist on doing so. It also retains a feeling of res­olute refinement. For an essentially frivo­lous vehicle, it seems very serious. One passenger’s remark: “It has a big-car feel in a small-car style.”

There are a few things that make you wonder. For all the factory’s pride in the ergonomics of its cockpit, you wonder why it’s adopted the too-many-buttons­-alike style for the radio controls. And why the wiper stalk is so convenient to your fin­ger tips that you wipe the windshield twice a mile whether it needs it or not. And why for your $31,000 you can’t have an adjust­able steering wheel.

You expect some cowl shake over ripply pavement, of course, just as you would in any other convertible. You don’t get a lot of it in the 325, but the wheel quivers lat­erally in your hands enough to dilute some of that stone-mountain feeling you want from a premium German car. And any ragtop is going to be an actual pain to live with at times: the times you can’t get away from a tire-whining truck, the times you have to do something with belongings that you normally leave in sight on a seat, the times you come back to a dusting of green pine pollen all over everything.

However, there are the other times. The soft summer-evening times, air like velvet, sun golden in the trees, lake water shimmering with joy . . .

Maybe everybody should own a con­vertible sometime in his life. Maybe this is one to own all through a lifetime.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com