BMW 123d 2009 Review - International

BMW 123d

What we liked
>> Crunching, no-nonsense engine performance
>> Brilliant fuel economy
>> Nimble, lightweight handling

Overall rating: 4.5/5.0
Engine/Drivetrain/Chassis: 5.0/5.0
Price, Packaging and Practicality: 4.0/5.0
Safety: 4.5/5.0
Behind the wheel: 4.0/5.0
X-factor: 4.5/5.0

About our ratings

Driving in Europe is a bit like heading out for a big, boozy work dinner. You know there will be a price to pay and you know that it will hurt. You also know that, without it, you lock yourself in to a life of going nowhere.

Refuelling time in Europe is the hangover from hell. I once put A$270 of diesel into an Audi Q7 and I thought I was lucky. The same tankful in the petrol version would have been another $50.

You can live with a little blast of hard acceleration here or there because you can still arrive at a reasonable consumption average. But hard, solid, enthusiastic driving for an hour or two is rare -- even if you can afford a $70,000 car, the missus will always find better things for you to spend $300 on than a two-hour tank of petrol.

But there's a new way around a boring life interspersed with the odd hard blat, because BMW has stuffed its little 1 Series coupe full of twin-turbo diesel goodness. It did the same thing with some success a year or so ago when it crammed the same car full of 3.0-litre, twin-turbo petrol-powered six cylinder, but the four-cylinder twin-turbo123d is an enormous change from the 135i.

For starters, at $60,180 for our six-speed automatic, it's considerably cheaper and, while it's not as fast in a straight-line sprint, a 135i driver would want to be on his game to come out on top in a rolling burst in any gear.

It might only be a 2.0-litre four-cylinder engine under the bonnet, but there's plenty of fight in it. It crunches out 400Nm of torque right down at 2000rpm, then holds its strength all the way through to where the 150kW takes over at around 4500.

BMW mates this to a six-speed auto and, in the 1 Series coupe shell, it pulls to 100km/h in a neat 7 seconds. This would be even quicker, except that even with one turbo smaller than the other and variable vane technology, it takes a little time to spool up when you step off the brake pedal and on to the throttle.

It's a much quicker proposition once it's rolling, though. Then, with both turbos huffing and 2000 bar of pressure driving the diesel into the combustion chambers, it fairly explodes with an urgency you can't escape. It must surely be one of BMW's quicker offerings between 80-120km/h and the wider-than-normal spread of engine performance also means the auto drops it straight into the heart of its gristle every single time.

And, when it does, the four pot might lack the sweetness of the in-line petrol six, but it's not bad all the same. At part throttle, it's actually pretty smooth and, at idle, it's louder outside the car than in it. It lumps up a fraction at full throttle, especially in a little patch around 1700rpm, but other than that, it's maybe 20 per cent coarser than a BMW petrol four pot. Diesels have come a long way.

And so did the 123d and I, covering more than 3000km in a two-week test. Keen to get home after a long week, we cruised down the 570km from Munich over the Alps to Modena at a steady 160km/h -- only to find the trip computer telling us we still had nearly 400km of range left in the 51-litre tank. So we headed to the hills for a couple of hours of playtime, which uncovered a few surprisingly good things.

Firstly, filling the pointy end full of high-torque diesel hasn't done too much to upset the chassis balance of the 1 Series coupe. It's still feels like it's dancing on its toes and you can place it basically anywhere on the road you like, even if it never quite feels as nimble as its nuggety shape suggests it should be.

A lot of that is because BMW built the 1 Series on the cheap, relatively speaking, so it borrowed a lot of 3 Series "modules" to speed up the process. While 3 Series suspensions and major engineering pieces made it faster and cheaper to develop, it means they're actually well over-engineered for the job at hand, so the 123d ends up weighing 1495kg, which is about 300 more than its looks suggest it should be.

But the body is only 4.4 metres long and 1.7 metres wide, and that helps that helps in Europe, too, because few of the fun bits of road are blessed with any reassuring width. It makes the 123d an incredibly usable package.

The gearbox, with the sequential lever that actually goes the right way, works so well in Sport mode that you can rarely be bothered with its Manual mode. Occasionally, it can dish out a woefully lumpy downshift as it tries to level off the ceaseless torque stream, but it's mostly all good news and mostly an unnoticed link.

You'll need to be brave and outgoing to love the interior our car had, with its burnt orange tints everywhere, but the cabin was comfortable and largely well laid out, even if there still is nowhere to leave your phone (apart from the pocket of your jeans when you wash them, but that's another story).

The seats have masses of lateral support out of the backrest, plenty of lumbar adjustment and the material seems to breathe pretty well, too. There's a big, unmissable brake pedal positioned neatly in either left or right-foot range and all the gauges are large and easy to read. It even picks up BMW's improved iDrive system, with better navigation and simpler operation, though I couldn't figure out how to check the fuel economy while the navigator was active.

There's a tiny little, three-spoke steering wheel with a great, fat, leather wheel rim, too, but it's connected to an electric steering system that still isn't perfect. On the upside, it's more accurate than it was when it turned up on the 3 Series and it also uses less fuel, because it only gives assistance when it's needed and, even then, only for as long as it's needed.

But the only significant issue hampering its handling isn't the steering -- its ride quality.

BMW, for reasons best known to the product planners, has almost given it enough spring travel to qualify as suspension, but not quite. It must be because they want people to instantly identify this diesel as 'Sport' that it rides like this, because it's absolutely not in the best interests of the handling or the grip.

Instead of riding the waves of torque to fling the little Bimmer through the twisties with utter glee, you're left backing off a bit because the faster you hit the bumps on the 17-inch run-flat tyres, the more they hurt. And, when I say bump, I really mean anything identifiably vertical, because no car on sale today gives its drivers a more honest interpretation of what the leading edge of the all four tyres are rolling over. Ruts, undulations, small stones, painted lines, slow insects, toothpicks, coins; you can feel them all in a 123d. It would find potholes in a billiard table.

Having a fast little car with a mighty heart and a nimble chassis, then stuffing this semi-suspension under it feels like a Stallone movie, where the director reinforces a subtle point with a redundant line in case the lowest-common denominators miss the point. And, in case you're one of them, too, it really detracts from the car.

Especially when, after a long, tough play in the mountains, there's still plenty of fuel in the tank. BMW claims a combined city/highway mileage of 5.2L/100km out of the 123d, but we easily managed better than that, posting 4.2 on one mixed tank without really trying. Even when we strapped the daylights out of it all the way back to Germany, hitting more than 240km/h on the autobahn before the snow began to fall, it only climbed into the sevens!

So it's fast, it's strong everywhere in its rev range, it's stable at high speed, it's nimble and it's cheekily fun while poking out a lot less CO2 than the 135i does. If they can just give it a ride that adults can live with, it'll be close to brilliant.

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