BMW M3 Touring (2024 - ) review

Expensive to buy, expensive to run, expensive to fuel, expensive to tax, expensive to insure … you get the picture but the Touring is unapologetically a pure petrolhead indulgence, even if it puts a more practical twist on the M3’s traditional talents. You’re still talking Porsche 911 money for an estate car here, even if it’s one capable of keeping any sports car honest in performance and handling. Looking ahead, BMW M is soon to announce its electric ambitions, so a more sustainable way to enjoy its products is coming. And the bigger M5 Touring offers a plug-in hybrid twist on the same vibe, but is even more expensive to buy. One small mercy? On a motorway cruise we saw 35mpg out of the M3 Touring. Clutching at straws, perhaps, but proof you can at least buy with heart and head at some level of agreement!
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The M in M3 stands for motorsport, and the Touring is built with that engineering mindset. Indeed, BMW even created a racing car version as an elaborate joke, and it ended up coming fifth overall on its first outing in the unbelievably tough Nürburgring 24-hour race. Which was a better result than Max Verstappen achieved, his Mercedes retiring from a dominant lead in the same race after a mechanical fault. You might reasonably ask what this has to do with the road car but the engine and other parts are shared between this and race version, so you can take some confidence in its toughness on this score. Hopefully that plays out in more everyday use as well!
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The M3 Touring is built with performance as its number one priority, but it’s still a modern BMW so comes with all the safety kit you’d hope for. We appreciated the more subtle interventions from the assistance systems, and shortcut for silencing the nagging speed limit alerts with a long press on the ‘set’ button for the cruise control. A hack worth knowing, since the system – like those in all cars – often calls it wrong. The M3 Touring also gets BMW’s neat xDrive all-wheel drive system, which is a good thing with this much power, especially on slippery roads. If you fancy yourself as a driving god and want to switch it off there is the option to revert to more traditional rear-wheel drive only, as well as a motorsport-style 10-step traction control system. Nice for tyre-smoking track action, but you’re better off leaving everything on for the road.

While it’s built for speed the M3 Touring is, fundamentally, a very well-equipped version of the regular 3 Series estate with all the luxury trimmings on top. Meaning the same combination of usable all-round size, comfortable accommodation for four (and a slightly lumpy perch for the unlucky person sitting in the middle of the rear seat) and a usefully big boot. In short, if the realities of family life mean you’re having to sell the sports car here’s your one-vehicle solution combining all the speed and excitement you could want with the space and versatility you need. True, the big tyres required to put the power down to the road can be a bit noisy on rougher road surfaces so if you regularly drive the southern section of the M25 that could get a bit wearing. The suspension is also a lot stiffer than a regular 3 Series Touring, so it can thump over the bumps at times. But you can adjust this electronically to a softer configuration as suits, the signature M1 and M2 buttons on the steering wheel offering easy access to two customised set-ups where you can adjust everything from ride comfort to steering and brake pedal feel and dial them up with one press. The standard seats are, meanwhile, sculpted, grippy and comfortable and would be our pick over the optional sports equivalents with their curious ‘man spread’ leg recesses and weight-saving cut-outs. They may look fancy but are perfectly sized for the rascals behind you to squeeze their feet through and kick you as you drive, the shiny carbon seat backs also very vulnerable to scuffing from little shoes. Save your money!

While the car in the pictures is the original version as launched in 2022 the one we tested had updates introduced for the 2024 model year across the whole M3 and M4 range, many of these focused on detail improvements to the already very stylish interior. This included upgrades to the operating system powering the typically slick twin-screen infotainment at the centre of the car, a new steering wheel with a motorsport-inspired ‘12’o’clock’ marker at the top and flattened bottom, new vent controls, freshened up trim materials and more. There wasn’t much wrong with it before, and we’re big fans of BMW’s balance of luxury and tech, the crisp graphics and logical menus of its built-in operating system one of the best in the business, here boosted with various M-specific features like a ‘drift analyser’ to measure – and score – how sideways you got it on the school run. A bit of a gimmick in reality, but it shows a sense of fun on the part of the people developing the car. If you want to spend even more money and make your M3 Touring fancier still BMW offers many and various ways to do that, including increasingly lurid leather options, extra carbon, fancy lightweight brakes and more, available separately or bundled into packs as suits. In for a penny…

500 horsepower plus in a family car isn’t anything all that unusual in our electrified age, but driving one generating this much power from a petrol-fuelled combustion engine alone feels a genuinely guilty pleasure these days. And something of a last hurrah as BMW M gears up to reinterpret its signature driving thrills for full electric power. More on this soon, but for now the M3 Touring is a fitting swansong for the kind of powerful petrol engines BMW has always stood for, the swelling rush of turbocharged boost so much more exciting than the binary power delivery of electric motors. The steering, brakes and transmission are perfectly calibrated to show the engine at its best as well, the automatic seemingly sharpened up and crisper than it was the last time we drove an M3, with the option to adjust the speed and aggression of the shifting as suits. The all-wheel drive system is also very clever, offering a sense of traditional BMW balance with the security of all-weather traction to pull the car straight before things go the wrong side of exciting. You’ll need to book a track day to really enjoy the performance on offer, the added bonus of doing so being the ability to run rings round much sportier looking machinery at the wheel of a family estate car. Just as the race version did at the Nürburgring!