EVO: BMW 335i Touring - Long Term Test

[PanterroR]

The newly arrived BMW 335i Touring needs running in, and gives Peter Tomalin an excellent excuse to drive all the way to Italy


Running-in – if you’re a believer – can be a bit of a fag, can’t it? That first 1000 miles at no more than 3500rpm or whatever it is might take as long as a month of normal driving. On the other hand, you could of course plan a nice little European jaunt – say from Cambridge to Maranello and back. Call it a 2000-mile round trip. That should do nicely.


I’d already been toying with the idea of driving down to Italy for issue 106's Dino Ferrari story, for no more noble a reason than I’ve recently developed an irrational but deeply felt aversion to flying. And then Lord Meltcafe announced that we were about to get a new BMW long-termer and would I like to run it? Suddenly the prospect of motoring down through France, across the Alps and on into Italy began to look extremely attractive. And so, barely a week after our sparkling new 335i M Sport Touring arrived at evo HQ, I was driving it onto the SpeedFerries catamaran at Dover, bound for Boulogne and, beyond that, Ferrari-land.


I’d experienced BMW’s brilliant twin-turbocharged 302bhp 3-litre straight-six in the shape of the 335i Coupe on eCoty 2006 and loved its effortless torque and characterful soundtrack. That it was mated to one of the best, most indulgent and most communicative BMW chassis in years made it, in my eyes, hugely desirable. And when I learned that they did the same mechanical package in the estate – or rather Touring – body, it became more attractive still. When you’ve three kids and as many as three dogs to carry at any one time (I know, I know), these things matter. In the words of BMW’s press officer, the 335i Touring had all the makings of a real-world supercar.


YG07 WXE certainly looks the part in Le Mans Blue, hunkered down on its M Sport suspension, the 18in ‘Star-spoke’ alloys tucked up nicely in the arches. It’s a chunk more handsome than the saloon, arguably more purposeful looking than the Coupe, too. Inside there’s Lemon Dakota leather, which is a sort of magnolia colour – it wouldn’t be my choice personally, but it looks good in pics and does have the benefit of being cooler to the trouser-seat in summer than dark-coloured leather.


Otherwise the spec of this car is pretty much exactly what I’d have ordered myself had I been in the happy position of buying my own 335i. Most of the important things (six-speed short-shift manual gearbox, those 18in alloys, Dynamic Stability Control+, air con, input for an MP3 player, etc) are included as standard in the £35,380 on-the-road price anyway. This one also has just under £5K’s worth of extras – chiefly a Bluetooth phone kit, leather, DAB radio, ‘Professional’ sat-nav system (a hefty £1970), and parking sensors – which together bring the total to a whisker over £40K.


Now, that’s a lot of money for a 3-series, but you know within the first handful of miles that this is a spankingly good car, and a properly fast one. Coming from a Jaguar XK, I’d wondered if the BeeEm might be slightly underwhelming. No fear of that. Not only does the 335i’s force-fed 3-litre six feel every bit as potent as the XK’s 4.2-litre naturally aspirated V8 – exceeding it in terms of mid-range urge and matching the Jag for the reach of its top-end too – the BMW’s chassis feels every inch as sporting, perhaps even shading the Jag for steering response and feel, body control and a general feeling of taut togetherness (though with one proviso, which we’ll come to in a moment).


So it was with a real flutter of anticipation that I rolled off the ferry on to French tarmac late on the Saturday evening, the sat-nav targeted on the Hotel Europa in the Via Mediterraneo, Maranello. The computer spelled out the enormity of the drive ahead – 852 miles, no less. Too many to cover in one day, so I stayed in Arras in northern France that night, then got stuck into the remainder the following day, finally arriving in Maranello late on Sunday evening, tired but hugely impressed by the 335i’s GT-style ground-covering ability and, not least, by the incredibly comfortable and supportive driver’s seat (complete with electrically adjustable side bolsters that squeeze your torso perfectly).


In sixth gear an indicated 100mph equates to an easy 3500rpm canter; wind and road noise are pleasingly well-suppressed, and after several hundred autoroute miles, mpg had risen from around 26 to almost 28, giving a range of more than 400 miles.


Best of all, when I reached the Alps, although most of the famous passes were still closed, I managed to find one brilliant, serpentine road leading to and from the ski resort of Andermatt, and for a couple of hours I had it virtually to myself. As the light slowly faded, I had a ball gunning the 335i from corner to corner, leaning on the grip until the tyres began to squeal and, in the numerous hairpins, the traction control tell-tale began to flicker.


Pressing the DTC button allows a few more degrees of slip but prevents you from making a complete arse of yourself; apparently you can disable the systems altogether, but I’ll save that for a trackday – a deserted Alpine pass at nightfall is probably neither the time nor the place to rediscover one’s own limits. The car, though, felt brilliant – apart from in a couple of corners where small, sharp bumps or ridges caused it to suddenly skitter across the surface, momentarily losing grip. Yep, the 335i, like so many fast BMWs but not, you’ll note, the real M-cars, has the controversial run-flats.


I’ll have to wear these tyres out first of course – in fact I can feel another trip to some mountain roads (and the odd trackday) coming on very soon – but it’ll be fascinating to see what difference fitting a set of conventional tyres will make. I’ve a feeling it could turn what is already a very, very good car into a genuinely great one.

Source EVO: BMW 335i Touring | Long Term Tests | Car Reviews | evo

 

[Mr Robert]

I really could live with one of those 335i E91:s...

 

[Bartek S.]

End of term: BMW 335i Touring

Though a brilliant driving machine, the 335i performed far from flawlessly…
Has a manufacturer ever simply forgotten to collect a long-term test car? Is there, somewhere, a journalist driving around in an old Ford or Vauxhall or maybe even a Maserati that the press office just never got round to picking up? When Autocar and Motor were merged in the late ’80s, both weeklies had a Jaguar XJ on long-term test. After the merger, only one of the cars appeared in the new mag; the other was used by staff to tool around in for months and months before someone at Jaguar twigged.

I was rather hoping something like this might happen with the 335i, especially after no-one came to collect it on the appointed day. Other cars, even other BMWs, came and went, and a week later it was still here. Unfortunately that very same day BMW GB’s press and PR supremo was paying a visit to Evo Towers and spotted it in the car park. ‘Erm, shouldn’t the 335i have come back to us by now?’ he called across the office. ‘Ah, yes, well-spotted,’ I mumbled. ‘We’ll, er, make a call to arrange it.’ Bugger. And extra bugger when it turned out the press garage actually had the car logged as safely returned.

I suppose they’d have caught up with us eventually – probably when the tax ran out. And I’d already pleaded successfully to have the loan extended by a month. But it was that sort of car – the sort that you’d go to almost any lengths to hang on to. It was quite simply the best long-termer I’ve ever had the privilege of ‘owning’.

So presumably I’d recommend it unreservedly and last one to the BMW showroom’s a sissy? Well, not so fast. As brilliant a driving machine and as beautifully wrought a family conveyance as it is, the 335i performed far from flawlessly.

The first glitch was with the infamous iDrive. I’m actually quite a fan of the oft-maligned gizmo that allows you to toggle between hi-fi, climate, satnav and Bluetooth at the push and woggle of the small control wheel. It’s a darn sight easier, and hence safer, than trying to locate myriad minuscule buttons somewhere down in the centre console. But my enthusiasm was dented when scarcely a month after the 335i arrived, the screen filled with the legend ‘BMW’ and nothing else. Whatever I did with the little wheel, it just span uselessly. Deprived for several days of sounds, control of my climate, satnav and hands-free, I wasn’t a happy bunny, and even less so when the local dealership, Wollaston BMW in Northampton, concluded that only a ‘complete software and control unit update’ would cure it. This, I was told, would require ‘the special machine’ and that wasn’t available till the following week. Oh, and it could take two days.

In fact it took just a day and the iDrive was restored. There then followed several months of unadulterated driving pleasure. The 302bhp twin-turbo 3-litre straight-six, which had just been voted Engine of the Year, had oodles of creamy torque absolutely everywhere. It was matched with a chassis that was deliciously taut and controlled; the slightly lowered M Sport suspension, 18in M alloys and Bridgestone Potenza runflats put you on intimate terms with the road surface. The steering was pleasingly weighty, responsive and confidence-inspiring. Even without deactivating the DTC you could sense lovely little slip angles developing at the rear as you felt your way around the limit. And with the rising snarl of the engine and the heavy but satisfying action of the six-speed manual box, the 335i had bags of character. All of which meant it was engaging to drive at any speed, but quite brilliant when you were really pressing on. In terms of cross-country pace and sheer involvement, I reckon the 335i isn’t far off the current M3.

In the summer it faced one of its sternest challenges: the family holiday. We’d booked a cottage at the far end of Cornwall and we’d decided to take two of the dogs as well as three kids and all their associated clobber. It was a squeeze but, with the addition of a roof box, we managed it. The boot’s not huge, but it’s well-shaped (it’s also a doddle to flatten the seats for large loads) and there’s a surprising amount of room for back seat passengers – enough for two teenagers and one 11-year-old without Bovingdon-style tantrums. The only fly in the sunscreen was that right on the morning of departure the onboard computer announced that a service was due – despite two thousand miles earlier saying that it wouldn’t be due for another 6000 miles. Doh. Since the computer also said the oil level was slightly low (there’s no manual dipstick) we topped it up and booked it in to Wollaston on our return.

The ‘Fast Lane’ oil-change service is claimed to take just 90 minutes and you get a voucher for a drink and a bite in the cafe while you wait, though in fact I was waiting for closer to two hours and forewent the advertised wash and wax (for the car, that is) to save time, but the cost of £162.95 was reasonable. Overall the service from Wollaston was excellent. Which was just as well, for my love affair with the 335i was about to face its biggest test.

Though often driven in the spirited fashion for which it was designed, the 335i had had a pretty cushy life compared with certain cars on the fleet, so it was a surprise when in mid-September after around 16,500 miles and just a month after its service, an engine fault warning appeared on the dash and the car went into reduced power mode. Surprise turned to consternation when Wollaston suspected a turbo fault and consternation turned to shock when they said they’d have to replace both turbos because the wastegates were prematurely worn, causing them to stick open. The car was with them for more than a week, though I did get a 320d Touring replacement and regular phoned updates. Seems it’s a big job replacing the turbos – in fact it’s an engine-out job – and since it’s all under warranty it cost the manufacturer more than two grand. Gulp.

After I reported the saga, three other 335i owners emailed to say they’d also had turbo failures, in one case at just 8000 miles. I put all this to BMW GB and a spokesman said there had been a ‘very small number of issues with wastegates sticking’. In three cases they’d replaced the actuators that controlled the wastegates. Overall they’d replaced fewer than ten turbochargers on 335is for whatever fault, which, he said, suggested they were ‘generally very reliable’. There was no service campaign or recall on the actuators or turbos. BMW’s feeling was that these isolated cases were due to ‘material failure, possibly due to manufacturing tolerances’.

So there you go. Please keep writing in with your experiences of this engine, and we’ll keep reporting them. If BMW is right, once these few cases have been rectified, we’ll have nothing to fear from the twin-turbo six and we can all go on enjoying its brilliant performance – and also its quite remarkable economy. We regularly saw over 27mpg, and over Christmas, when I was driving particularly carefully on account of the 335i being laden with children, dogs, booze and pressies, we saw 28.5mpg.

Living with it for nine months revealed some minor flaws – the fob from the plastic ‘key’ dangled exactly where my left knee wanted to be; the headlights weren’t quite as strong as they might have been on full beam; the interior wasn’t as classy as an equivalent Audi’s, though the Lemon Dakota leather stood up well; the DAB radio sometimes struggled to find a signal; there was the occasional clonk from the driveline if you weren’t super-smooth with the clutch. But in every other respect it was better than painless, it was a positive joy to live with.

Our 335i had one more minor wobble to throw, when the satnav froze while navigating me through Hammersmith one evening in mid-November. Stopping and restarting the engine fixed that. Otherwise it was back to its brilliant best right up until the day in late January when it finally went back. I scrolled through the computer readout one last time: 25,510 miles; 28.2mpg; 6000 miles to the next service; oil just below the max. I took it for one last drive, and it sounded as dreamy and surged forward as effortlessly as the day it arrived. The ride still jiggled and thumped over the worst urban roads, but I realised I’d learned to live with the runflat tyres, which by now were worn down but still (just) legal.

While the faults can’t be glossed over, I still want to tell the world what a brilliant car this is. Cross-continental drives, trackdays, family duties – it excelled at them all. That last drive was to find a hand car- wash. When the guy had finished leathering the 335i he stood back and nodded his head slowly in appreciation. ‘Great car, mate,’ he said. I couldn’t argue with that.

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