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There is nothing like the sound and smoothness of an inline 6 cylinder, one reason BMW has stuck to the layout for years. The I6 will live on in magnesium cased, 3.0L form in standard production cars while the upcoming M coupe and roadster will use with the iron blocked 3.2L M variant for a few more years.

But the M3, which has utilized an I6 for the past ten years, will be moving to a V8 with the redesign (the new engine is essentially the V10 from the M5 with two cylinders lopped off).

Like their adoption of turbocharging, it’s a sign of market pressure that BMW’s going to a V8 - there was simply no other way to keep up with the power and torque figures of the V8s from Audi and MB (even if the lower weight and its superior distribution kept acceleration and lap times competitive).

And yet AutoWeek recently polled its readers, and out of 551 voters, 46% responded ‘the more horsepower the better’ and 27% said ‘they had to do it’.

Apparently it’s not MB and Audi that’s the root of the problem – it’s those who believe a horsepower number means as much as sound, smoothness, agility, or heritage.

The 4.2-litre V8 is one of the great road car engines of the moment. At 1500rpm in sixth gear there is real urge on offer, yet it sounds and feels sensational at high revs in low gears and delivers the sort of thump only supercar drivers will have been familiar with. Its very best work occurs from 5000rpm upwards: the cam phasing changes slightly, the exhaust note hardens and the acceleration crystallizes into one final burst towards the cut-out…An M3 cannot compete with the RS4’s relentless wave of low- and mid-range flexibility, even if it is marginally more explosive over the final few revs before the limiter. – Autocar

Real racing drivers are a different breed. Yet so often you see rich guys trying to be racing drivers. They turn up with their car on a shiny aluminium trailer and when they put on their race suit it is bursting at the stitching! Out on the track they get their doors blown off. Like golf, it’s the only sport I can think off where amateurs try and beat the real racers. What’s the point? ... I prefer to go out and drive on my own, to drive by myself. I don’t want anyone to see how bad a driver I am. I am okay with a wrench and enjoy driving my cars to my limits. But I am aware it is often not to the cars limits! – Jay Leno, 4car

Q: Is it just me or have you noticed the new BMW 3 series’ proportions echo the MINI’s ‘bulldog stance’?

A: It’s not just you… BMW has always tried for short overhangs (the less mass is outside the wheelbase the lower the polar moment and the more responsive the car is to directional changes) but in recent years we’ve noticed they’ve been getting their handling prowess by widening the track.

Take for example the trouble they went through widening the E46 M3 vs. the standard E46, the way this 3 and 5 series are wider than the last. (The MINI’s stance – and its handling – stem from the fact that it is far shorter than average but as wide as other cars).

There is a downside to this, however… at some point the cars become too wide for comfort – the car is more difficult to thread through traffic or a narrow back road, not to mention park in spaces that seem to be getting narrower at the same time. People who have driven both wide and narrow bodied 911s comment that the narrower one looks less aggressive but can be driven more aggressively on public roads…

Q: When taught to drive stick I was told that, to save wear and tear on the clutch, I should put it in neutral about 100 feet from my complete stop before fully applying the brake. Is this true? Also when should I shift from one gear to the next? Have any other tips for someone who wants to drive a manual?

A: Whoever taught you taught you wrong.

You should stay in gear as long as possible, applying the brake as you would in an automatic until engine speeds falls to where the fuel comes back on (youll feel the burp/hiccup). The speed and distance varies depending on what gear you’re in when you see the red light/stop sign ahead.

Doing so saves wear on the brakes and saves gas too (in a fuel injected car the engine uses no gas at all when you are rolling in gear until the fuel comes back on somewhere above 1000 rpm. Rolling with the clutch depressed or the car in neutral uses as much gas as you would sitting at a stoplight. Rolling with the clutch depressed wears the throw out bearing on the clutch and that or rolling in neutral can cause premature wear of both the fluid and the transmission). If you’re concerned about clutch wear keep your foot away from the pedal unless you’re actually switching gears and get the car going with as little gas/engine speed as possible.

As far as when to shift – that’s more of a feel thing – you press the gas as you would in an auto then shift when acceleration lets up in that gear. The goal is to shift when the next gear has something to offer, not before so its often better to shift a little too late than a little too early (Lugging an engine is more damaging than reving it a little higher).

Anyone can keep a manual from stalling – the real satisfaction is the challenge of executing every shift smoothly. The best drivers shift up and down with such smoothness that your coffee and your sleeping passenger’s head is less unsettled than it would be if you were in an automatic.

executive vice president of VWoA… Hallmark said in an interview at the Geneva auto show this month that Volkswagen is working on “how we can de-content the Golf, change the configuration a bit and make it affordable.”...”I want the young, first-time buyer who wants a safe, new car that drives great, that gets three friends in, and carries stuff in the back. And they can personalize it – because they’ll have a bit of money left for things like bigger wheels.” – Automotive News

Given my experience with the H rated M2s and the positive user reviews I was expecting more from these V rated M3s. They are very good tires but there are a few traits I haven’t seen anyone mention so you might want to take them into account…

First the rolling resistance is much higher than the M2s – even with the pressures bumped up to max load levels fuel economy is down by 2-3 mpg. The car needs more throttle to keep rolling and feels sluggish as a result, losing more speed on uphills etc unless you remodulate the throttle (I find myself delaying upshifts and reaching for downshifts more often now).

Second even at equivalent pressures the ride is appreciably firmer, no doubt due to the V speed rating – too bad they were not available in the H rating suggested by BMW in this (-1) size.

Lastly they don’t have the precision and stability I remember in the M2s. Aside from these being at 10-11/32s vs. the M2s being down to 3-4/32”, the way the center blocks are arranged seems a factor…

I liked the M2s so much I drove ‘em year round but these I’ll change over come spring…

test car: ‘03 BMW 325i sport – 16” OEM Ci wheels

other tires sampled on this car: Continental ContiWinterContact TS810

That’s what you’ll get if you read this piece by Andrew Frankel comparing SUVs vs. wagons on 4car.

Here’s an excerpt:

The traditional car classes are collapsing and spaces between them are being filled with an ever increasing array of crossover product. We have [minivans] that don’t carry any more people than hatchbacks and [wagons] that are useless at carrying loads. We have supercars that are never driven fast and convertibles that are at their best with the roof up. It’s hardly a wonder we have no problem accepting as normal the concept of an off-roader that can’t be used off-road.

That’s what my mother said when I suggested she and my father choose a PT Cruiser over a Neon, Stratus and Taurus at the LAX rental counter. Here’s why:

The fundamentals really work. The PT Cruiser was born as a sit-high car. Your eyes enjoy a near-SUV view. The driving position is excellent. The firm front buckets hold you like good dinner chairs. The oversize, deftly detailed four-spoke steering wheel is contrary to today’s fashion… All around you see interesting details. For example, the outside hatch release: It has intricacy, and a feeling of value beyond anything offered by the others. The Chrysler simply overwhelms in its sense of quality. It has fewer quivers through the structure, fewer thrums from the powertrain, and fewer thumps from the road. Wind noise is subdued. The Cruiser feels far more expensive than its price. – Car and Driver 06.02

[with the optional touring suspension] Cruiser is surprisingly adept on snaky sections of back roads. Body roll is well-controlled, particularly in view of the relatively high center of gravity; the power rack-and-pinion steering is nicely weighted, with better-than-average road feel; and the damping rates are well-selected for keeping the tires in contact with the surface… Car and Driver 06.00

There’s an old saying about the danger of half knowledge, so I’m always looking for the flipside to a claim, the engineering compromise. When I see a car advertised as having “5star safety” I immediately check how it does in offset collision and side impact tests done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety then cross reference real-world death rates, while taking into account vehicle weight, handling/braking and rollover propensity as well. It’s inexact, but far more useful than blindly following one test, especially as a car that does well in one test (and is advertised as such) often does poorly in the rest. (Full frontal collisions favor cars with long snouts, offset and side impact tests are a better test of structural soundness).

On the tour for his latest book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that humans don’t have the ability to weight information. You can write a formula or computer program to place more significance on one thing than another but when you make decsions on a day-to-day basis the mind functions more like a ball on a roulette wheel – you hop around from factor to factor until you get tired of the process, lose momentum and settle on whatever’s easiest. (I see this a lot when helping people – they tend to buy whatever’s in front of them the moment they get fed up of car shopping, not what they want the most).

Now retired mechanical engineer Michael Dulberger has weighted the crash data according to its statistical significance (43% of deaths occur in front impacts, 26 in side imacts, etc.) and shared the results here.

(Thanks him for that, and to Motor Trend’s Frank Markus for the lead…)