Car of the Year Awards 2025: Performance Car of the Year
First and foremost, a great performance car is entertaining and involving to drive, but unlike pure sports cars, they also have to be practical and comfortable enough to use every day...
BMW M3 Touring Competition xDrive
There was a time when air forces required a different plane for every mission. Nimble interceptors for dogfights, longrange bombers for deep strikes, reconnaissance jets for spying on the enemy – each built for one job and one job only. But that approach was expensive, inefficient and, frankly, outdated.
Enter the multi-role fighter – a jet small and agile enough to win a dogfight but powerful and advanced enough to dominate long-range missions. Much like a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the BMW M3 Touring is a multi-role fighter – one you can park on your driveway.
It’s built to handle every scenario you can throw at it – and it does so with devastating effectiveness. Need a practical transporter for an Alpine sortie? A 500-litre boot makes light work of all your kit, and versatile 40/20/40 split-folding seats let you slide skis through the middle without sacrificing comfort for four adults.
Try doing that in an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio… oh wait, you can’t, because Alfa doesn’t make it as an estate. Those long-range operations can be carried out in record time, too. With four-wheel drive and the same 523bhp twin-turbo 3.0-litre straight six engine as the M3 saloon, the M3 Touring can catapult from 0-62mph in 3.6sec.
Away from a péage, it’ll leave the Giulia Quadrifoglio floundering somewhere in its vapour trail, and if you opt for the £2175 M Driver’s Pack (thus raising the top speed from 155mph to 180mph), you’ll be able to outrun low-flying planes on your favourite section of autobahn.
When the road gets twisty, the M3 Touring transforms into a precision weapon. With relatively compact dimensions and a clever rear-wheel drive mode, it dances through corners with an agility that makes the Audi RS6 Avant and new M5 Touring feel like lumbering tankers.
The M3 is playful, mechanical and responsive, with a soundtrack that hits all the right notes. It demands your attention in a way that even the best-handling electric rival, the Porsche Taycan, can’t match.
If you want to tailor your M3 Touring for track superiority, BMW gives you the option of an M Race Track Package. It’s pricey (£15,275), but the carbon-ceramic brakes it contains offer immense stopping power, while 10-stage traction control is a great help in dodgy conditions, and carbonfibre bucket seats clamp you in place no matter how many Gs you’re generating.
Yet for all its firepower, the M3 Touring is brilliant on mundane missions too. School runs, the weekly shop, commuting… it nails the daily grind with class-leading infotainment and an interior that’s well ahead of the Giulia’s in terms of quality. And it’s ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
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