Gadgetory

whether you're all grown up and buy BMWs frugally or are a high school trust fund kid the 3-series tend to be your ride this is what made the company and it only keeps getting back let's drive to 2012 335i sedan and check the Peck this is BMWs bread-and-butter the 4-door 3-series sedan without any M it's not a retractable it's nothing special except the cars that people who drive a Camry today typically aspire to let's get inside nothing too surprising inside this 335 for 2012 you've got the iDrive controller and of course the iDrive related screen wide screen but not as big as you'll see in some of the more expensive BMWs among the highlights I'll call out the media sources just about everything you care about is in here we've got of course am/fm HD radio you've got in here an aux jack USB which is also for your Apple devices streaming Bluetooth which is working kind of intermittently for me I've tried it on a couple of droid phones and I'm getting at best media playback no meta tags and no logic control no Track advance back and forth there's a premium audio system we have fitted on this car it's about a grand it's a Harman Kardon upgrade I don't know if it's just my ears in this car I couldn't get it to sound good no matter what I did I went to the bass the treble on all the other settings I dug into the equalizer which you get with the HK system I couldn't get it to sound anything but either shrill on one end or totally tubby on the other with every source now under the connected drives menu here at the top this is connecting through my smart phone to give me a wireless live internet connection for things like news weather stuff that you don't care about while you're driving but I do get interested when I get to Google local search and here you do a free-form search to find things which you can turn into a nav instruction for example that to me is absolutely brilliant now let's move on to some of the driver assistance technology you can option upfront cameras here obviously the rear view cam is almost common these days but we also have optional front cameras on this car as part of a package that look out both corners of the front bumper cover three choices on the gearbox in this car you're going to get this 8-speed automatic with this ice cream scoop paddle thingy at BMW does now and no paddles as kind of the main variant of this car there's also a freebie a pic to get a six-speed manual for no extra charge you can also get an 8-speed sport automatic for five hundred dollars more and that would also include paddles and different tuning in response and this little rocker switch next to the shifter lets you choose one of several profiles for the drivetrain starting with the lamest being Eco Pro lame in terms of performance but it's great because it optimizes the efficiency of the vehicle which has by the way auto start/stop and brake regeneration when you hit the brakes you're actually generating juice to go back in the battery so the alternator doesn't do all the work and therefore lessening the drag on the engine increasing efficiency auto start/stop drives me nuts in a BMW it's not that smooth so I use that button right there to switch it off but you're going to live some mpj and then you've got comfort which is really your normal balance mode for this car and you can also go to a sport setting it's going to sharpen up things like shifting throttle response etc and our car has the head-up display also part of an optional package or you can get it all a cart it gives you a really great multicolor very bright heads-up of the most important things right there in the windshield so under the hood is a venerable three litre BMW inline six they're putting these in just about everything they make and for good reason it's a great motor turbocharged in this case not all of them are but this one is the twin scroll turbo it's one turbo with to scroll profiles inside of it to work at different parts of the RPM band that means it's very responsive the numbers 300 horse 300 foot-pounds of torque gets this roughly 3500 pound car no lightweight up to 60 in the low 5 second range it's a good number while delivering 20 30 mpg if you go for the manual or 2333 will be automatic I bet you're going to get oh by the way notice this same basic engine is in the 640 I we recently drove but there it gets 315 horse 330 foot-pounds of torque so when you see a 3 liter twin scroll turbo on a BMW it doesn't mean the outputs the same just the architecture oh by the way I'm very excited about this low tech innovation this hood latch no longer looks like something from one of the Saw movies which it did on recent BMWs this huge hook meant to haul your brain out through your sinuses now it's relatively benign thank you and they also got to get rid of the label that says don't lift your head up too hard now winter on the open road in this car it's a strange mix of impressions you get first of all that engine just won't quit it's one of the great stories in propulsion the power just keeps coming it appears to be this flat chunky torque curve all the way up till it runs out of breath and that's way up there but the transmission in this car is kind of letting me dead we have the base eight speed and it's just sort of this disconnected kind of Numb thing down shifts aren't great up shifts tend to be strangely delayed sometimes and it doesn't seem to be the match for this motor that's why there's a sport eight and a six feet Daniel bear in mind though that six feet is going to make the car slower and more gas-guzzling you can't of course shift this car manually even with the base transmission by getting the panel over here on the left side but I feel that if you have to shift an automatic to get good results out of it it's not a great automatic and the sport mode here is also a big help but it makes the car too high-strung for everyday driving and stop and go and commute and I'm almost certain it also clobbers mpg because it keeps those rpms way up there so this car needs a transmission ectomy option the Sport Automatic oh by the way a ride quality in this car is probably not what you expect from something that will cost you typically north of 50 grand it's kind of intrusive kind of utilitarian a lot of road noise and tire drumming and the occasional sharp input coming back from the suspension even when I'm not in sport mode that may or may not delight you depending what you expect from a luxury sports sedan pricing of modern 3:35 is an exercise in how did that turn into a $50,000 car that's about with these cost well equipped now base is 44 grand delivered but to go see that style you got to add a few things the tech package with the apps the head-up display and GPS navigation that's going to run your 3100 driver assist with the blind spot tech and all those fancy cameras almost 2 grand more premium audio as I mentioned just shy of a grand and finally you may want to go for the sports 8 speed because I wasn't crazy about this one all in these are no longer affordable cars to most people but they are really well built have one of the great engines in human history and their technology remains cutting edge