This BMW is the perfect car for hauling heinie. It is invisible. The collection of automotive urban legends that lives around our offices includes one about a manager who was nearly fired from a Mazda dealership for ordering a gold (metallic beige--you decide) sedan with a manual transmission. The car sat at the back of the lot for years because only old people bought gold cars, and no old people bought cars with manual transmissions. The car was unsalable, at any price. As far as anyone who counts is aware, this BMW does not exist. Even if you go so fast you are noticed, no cop wants to be bothered pulling over a 55-year-old engineer who is just trying to get to the golf course in time to finish the back nine before the sun goes down.
Wonder Woman's jet was invisible, too. As little as this car registers under probable cause, it compensates by providing means. Its smoothness and quietness belie muscle nearly the equal of an E36 M3. We sometimes whine about the response of drive-by-wire throttles. BMW, along with Porsche, sets a standard that others would do well to emulate. After driving other cars, even those with mechanical throttle control, I am miscalibrated for the BMW and, when trying to match revs for a downshift, spin the engine too high. The response is quick and perfectly linear.
Sheer acceleration in a straight line is not awe-inspiring when one has been driving our long-term Boxster S for a week, but the 330i is still one of the big fish on the road. Consider the 330i's grunt "sufficient." One can easily be the fastest car in the vicinity by the end of an onramp, and squirting around slower traffic is effortless. The only handicap in such use is the sedan's sheer bulk. Because it's a four-door, there's just a lot more car back there than with the sports cars usually used to slice and dice L.A.'s mess. But neither are those sports cars the preferred lunch wagons around the office. On wide-open highways, with little other traffic around, it is very easy to accidentally cruise at 95 to 100 mph. Use of the cruise control is recommended, as neither wind, engine nor road noise really indicates that one's speed has risen far beyond normal.
The quietude on such trips encourages one to exercise the stereo. While not exactly bad, it plays second to any Audi recent enough to remember. It is apparent that the money was spent elsewhere, but with this car, that's kind of the point.
We took the BMW to a high-performance driving school at Buttonwillow Raceway Park, courtesy of Driving Concepts, Inc. The program was well-organized and featured on-track instruction with pro race drivers, including Cort Wagner, Kelly Collins and Belinda Endress. The ratio of instructors to students was impressive, while the atmosphere between sessions was relaxing, with the possibility of sitting around bench racing with one's on-track heroes.
On the track, with Dynamic Stability Control disabled, the BMW's handling was awesome, just like a great big Miata. It could be throttle steered at will, and its responses were perfectly linear. Unfortunately, all the writers who have pointed out that the E46's steering has been slowed down to the detriment are correct. Also, because the 330i is intended to be the ultimate daily driving machine, it does not perform at 100 percent of its capabilities indefinitely. Three or four hard laps of Buttonwillow's full circuit would reliably cause the tires and brakes to fade, requiring the pace to be cut back considerably. I don't consider that to be a major flaw, however, as if one had bought one's BMW for track driving, one would have bought an M3.
The forward placement of the E46's A-pillars required significant adjustment for me. With the seat moved back to accommodate my height, the left A-pillar effectively narrows the field of vision, blocking the proper view through tight left-hand turns. As apexes disappeared prematurely off the side of the windshield, the turns seemed suddenly to be much tighter than they actually were, and I was faced with the difficult process of rebuilding my confidence. Other E46s have exhibited the same problem for me on mountain roads, where visibility and confidence are at least as critical, but I do not experience it in E36s. Shorter drivers, because they are closer to the windshield, don't have this problem.
It has occurred to me that, while cars come bigger, faster and with more stuff in them, very few cars are really any better than this BMW, at any price. That thought goes through my head whenever I walk away from the 330i, and seems truer each time.