BMW 335i GT 2013 Review - International

What we liked
>> Incredibly versatile interior
>> Terrific rear legroom
>> Better looking than 5 GT

Not so much
>> Unconvincing ride quality
>> Floaty steering
>> Diesel no longer an NVH leader

Some other people need more space and versatility than a 3 Series Touring can give them, and a higher seating position wouldn’t hurt them, either.

Still others tick both of those boxes, but don’t want an X3 or an X1, so what can BMW provide them?

The last time BMW wheeled out this kind of rationale to a bunch of journalists at a car launch, we were sitting in the Portuguese sunshine watching them wheel out the 5 Series GranTurismo.

That the bigger car singularly failed to excite the masses hasn’t stopped the mighty machine that is BMW’s development and product planning arm, which is why we’re now climbing into the 335i GranTurismo.

PRICE AND EQUIPMENT

Given that the 335i is the range-topper, you can expect that will be at the upper end of that range in its home country, where it goes on sale in July this year.

People expect plenty at the prices BMW will ask for this, and that’s what they’re given. There are heated leather seats, a leather steering wheel and a stultifying array of electronic assistance systems.

The multimedia system juts proud of the dash and delivers everything from navigation to television to internet connectivity that allows you to use satellite radio or just pull down your song list from your own phone.

PACKAGING

Not only do they love their sedans above all else, but they love riding in the back of them as much as driving, so the Chinese-spec 3 Series sedan is a much bigger animal than the one Australia gets.

While the jury’s out on how the Chinese will accept this body shape, they’ve already helped the 335i GranTurismo’s future because it sits on the extended wheelbase from their 3 Series sedan.

That means it has had a 110mm stretch to 2960mm between the axles and 72mm of that has been given over to the rear legroom. It takes the standard sedan’s yeah-maybe rear legroom and turns it into something convincing. It’s no longer an automatic ‘shotgun’ call for the front passenger.

It’s also considerably longer overall than a 335i sedan, having grown 200mm to 4824mm, and a lot of that is in the cargo area. It must be, because it carries exactly the same front overhang as the Touring and the sedan.

That translates to 520 litres of luggage capacity and you can turn that into 1600 litres by folding down the rear seats. Both measurements are 25 litres more than you get in the Touring and BMW has even engineered it so you can take both the cargo blinds out and carry them under the plushly carpeted boot floor.

All that cargo space means you can get creative about what (and what shape) to put in there to get it close to its 570kg payload. There is plenty of scope in there, even if you throw in a couple of burly rugby-esque chaps up front.

Another key area of difference between this and the Touring is that the ride height is 81mm higher, putting it somewhere between the existing 3 Series models and the X3.

It isn’t just bigger in the back, but it also feels wider and more spacious, though that’s just a trick of so much light coming in through the large glass area. It is well designed back there, though, with deep grooves in the back of the front seat for the knees and plenty of foot space beneath them.

There is one area that hasn’t exactly grown with the car. The fuel tank measures only 60 litres, which might make for a merry old cruise in the 320d version, with its 4.7L/100km NEDC fuel consumption number, but not so much in the 335i that just manages to slip beneath the 8.0L/100km barrier. And, even then, only in automatic form.

MECHANICAL
>> Familiar powertrain, familiar suspension, brand-new problems
With three petrol and two diesel engines, there will be five launch engines for the 3 Series GranTurismo in Europe, to be followed up by another one of each later in the year, when BMW’s newest GT also gets an all-wheel drive option.

The engine that leads them all, though, is this one: the familiar, yet still mighty 335i turbo-six.

A light-pressure turbocharger, variable valve timing and lift plus direct fuel-injection augment the classic 3.0-litre inline six-cylinder layout. It’s as good as technology gets in the few remaining straight-six petrol motors in the automotive world.

The oversquare six develops 225kW of power, but of more concern to a car this size is its massive – and early – torque load. It delivers 400Nm of twist at the flywheel, but it does it from just 1200rpm. Its electronics are then so clever it holds that torque peak all the way through to 5000rpm, by which time the power peak has well and truly taken over.

This engine has a six-speed manual gearbox in Europe but if you want this in Australia, you’d almost certainly be alone. It will instead arrive with the eight-speed automatic transmission that is pre-engineered for idle-stop and all-wheel drive. Not that there’s much chance of an all-wheel drive system being fitted to Australian 335i GranTurismos.

The rest of the architecture is familiar, with a sophisticated strut front-end and an even more sophisticated five-link rear suspension. Unlike the 5 Series GranTurismo, its little brother uses steel (rather than air) springs for the rear suspension, which has its own consequences. It also continues BMW’s love affair with electric power steering.

On paper, it’s not over-braked in any way, but that has become the norm for volume BMWs and they’re rarely found wanting, even with the GranTurismo’s single-piston, floating brake calipers at both ends. No flashy six-piston Brembos here, then.

BMW knows it has copped plenty of flak for its bloody-minded commitment to run-flat tyres, though its board member in charge of development, Herbert Deiss, insists the GranTurismo’s 17-inch tyres are all standard tubeless deals. Nonetheless, we were confronted with either 18-inch run-flats on the 320d version or 255/40 R19 run-flats on the 335i. Nicer in pictures, he apologised.

The extra metal has added around 60kg to each 3 Series Touring, too, which means the 335i GT is a 1650kg proposition, and that’s on the drier DIN cycle.

ON THE ROAD
>> Convincing package, unconvincing ride and handling
It’s not always a good idea to launch cars in Sicily, and that’s nothing to do with Don Corleone. Its roads are appalling, by and large. They have all the hallmarks of being under-engineered when they were built in the first place and under-maintained ever since.

Huge chunks of subsidence pock-mark even fairly main routes, heavy rains often bring landslips down on them, corners tighten inexplicably, the biggest trucks seem to prefer the narrowest tracks and tattoo them with deep longitudinal grooves and you never escape the crunching square-edged hits of pot-holes, expansion joints and careless surface joins.

Then there is the road surface itself. When it’s intact, it creates an adventure akin to driving on an invisibly loose surface. That’s because the tarmac has all manner of stuff crushed into it, including chalk and marble. And it’s worse when it rains. In short, it’s hard to understand why BMW would ever launch a car there.

The upshot is that the 335i GranTurismo’s ride felt considerably less than brilliant here, but we’re struggling with what level of blame to apportion to the car and what level to the local conditions.

It certainly came as a shock when the guy in charge of its chassis told us his only regret was that it was too soft. We found it anything but.

The worst of it came from the rear-end, with its spring rates chosen as a compromise to deliver empty-car ride comfort and handling yet still carry 500kg of who-knows-what behind the rear axle line in the cargo area.

The diesel was, surprisingly, more rigid than the 335i, but the petrol car wasn’t miles behind it. Even in its comfort mode, the square-edged bumps cracked hard enough into the back-end of the car that we felt its resonance all the way through the body, as though it had punched through the suspension bushes and into the chassis itself.

They didn’t just strike vertically, either, because the road noise from each of the square-edged hits resounded through the cabin, too.

The Comfort mode’s steering, too, suffered significantly from the longitudinal undulations left by the trucks, feeling wafty and particularly loose in the first few degrees off centre.

Where the 3 Series sedan and wagon deliver stellar handling and a good ride compromise, we found the GranTurismo to be unsettled, busy and overly demanding with the level of road information it was delivering, seemingly unfiltered, to the cabin’s occupants.

The steering improved markedly in the Sport and Sport+ modes, but then the same mode’s ride quality was often unbearable over the island’s worst black (and, usually, grey) top. A way to combine the Sport mode’s steering with the Comfort mode’s damping set-up wouldn’t hurt, and neither would a more thorough test somewhere with more representative roads.

So that aspect – a significant aspect for a car meant to attract a softer clientele than the standard 3 Series low-riding range – will need to wait until its Australian launch for a definitive analysis. For now, we won’t slam it, even if that’s the knee-jerk reaction. We’ll just wait.

But some things don’t change no matter where you launch them and one of those things is the interior package. It’s a solution that just works.

You can feel pretty quickly that you’re not deep inside the chassis, like you are with the sedan, but this delivers a different idea. The seat is about 80mm further off the ground than the sedan’s (which only adds to our confusion about its ride quality, because there is another 25mm of suspension travel to soak up bumps).

Damned fine seats they are, too, with a layer of soft cushioning immediately beneath the leather skin and a stiffer, more supportive layer not far beneath the surface. They’re a fantastic compromise between delivering enough support during hard cornering and delivering long-range comfort.

But it’s the rear seat that stands out. It’s a full five-seater, even though the width is best served making either two adults or three kids comfy, rather than three adults. The legroom in the back is enough to make potential 5 Series buyers start to ask difficult questions of their dealers. You can easily cross your legs in the back without even clipping the front seats.

The shoulder space has been neatly carved out of the sides, where the foldable rear seats clip into the side of the cabin. These seats also have adjustable backrest angles, which can help deliver another 30-odd litres of space in the cargo area.

There is plenty of headroom, too, and the only question mark is really whether the quest for three full seats has come at the expense of some more shape in bases of the outboard ones.

Like the rear seats, the cargo area delivers exactly as promised, with thick carpeting covering the entire space, easy flip-down seats and a wide, flat floor barely hindered by suspension interference. Yep, beautifully delivered and you can imagine this thing becoming an ultra-versatile addition to a family garage.

As it is with virtually every BMW it’s fitted to, the 3.0-litre turbocharged six struggles to stay in the shadows. It’s a highlight everywhere it goes, with scarcely a vibration the driver doesn’t specifically ask for, nary an unsophisticated moment and it’s as happy to crunch up against its rev limiter as it is to cruise indifferently in traffic.

BMW claims a 5.4-second sprint to 100km/h for it, and that’s about how it feels. But the in-gear sprints between 80 and 120km/h are probably more telling. In fourth gear, it leaps across the gap in 5.8 seconds and it’s only 0.8 seconds slower when you try it a gear higher.

That all adds up to a terrific combination of straight-line sprinting and muscular overtaking ability. With all of that torque available at just 1200rpm, the 335i delivers effortless punch away from the lights and deals with hills with intemperate disdain.

Tempting as it is to short-shift and stay in the torque band, it’s such a sweet spinner that it’s never too long before you find your fingers reaching for the downshift paddle on the steering wheel to swing the tacho needle higher in the range.

Then you find the aural efforts haven’t been ignored, with the six spinning seamlessly and coupling a sweet feel with a meaty exhaust note. If you wind down the window, you can also hear a little turbo whistle when the driver comes off the throttle.
The eight-speed auto is every bit as good here as it is everywhere else. Its shifts in Sport mode are quicker than normal and nicely attuned to the driver’s steering and braking efforts -- and it’s a lot faster to react in Manual mode than Benz’s seven-speeder.

It all works. Almost. A big question mark remains over the 3 Series GT’s suspension, for which we promise to find an answer when we get it on home soil.

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