The most controversial BMWs ever made

In the near-century since the Bavarian company - already renowned as a maker of aircraft engines - entered the automotive industry, there has always been something to talk about.

By way of illustration, here are 29 BMWs which could for one reason or another be described, using what we concede is an above-averagely wide definition of the term, as controversial. They appear in chronological order.

Although not much fuss was made about it at the time, the most controversial thing about BMW’s first car in retrospect was the fact that it wasn’t a BMW at all, but an Austin Seven. BMW didn’t even have anything to do with it at first, but inherited it through buying Fahreugfabrik Eisenach, which had been building it under licence.

BMW made several updates, and 1932 introduced the 3/20, which was still related to the Austin but sufficiently different to be considered a separate vehicle. In 1994 BMW purchased the successor company to Austin, Rover Group.

The elegantly swooping lines of the first BMW launched after the Second World War led to it being nicknamed the Baroque Angel. Less positively, it was very expensive (reputedly costing four times the average annual German salary), and its 2.0-litre 64bhp straight six engine was too weak for the 1430kg weight of the car.

The power output gradually increased, and the addition of a 2.6-litre V8 to the range made a big difference, but overall the 501 was, in BMW’s own words, “not a commercial success”.

The idea of BMW producing a bubble car is almost beyond imagining today, and there was no precedent for it when the company took over the design of Italian manufacturer Iso’s little Isetta in a desperate attempt to have something in its line-up which would actually make money.

The plan worked, but there’s only so much profit you can make from a car like this, and BMW needed to try harder to drag itself out of financial peril.

Related to the 501, and powered by a 3.2-litre V8 engine, the 507 was arguably one of the most beautiful cars BMW ever made. This, along with the fact that Elvis Presley bought one while doing military service in Germany, should have worked in its favour, but the 507 was expensive to make and had to be priced accordingly. Sales were so poor that BMW gave up after only 251 examples had been built.

This did nothing for the health of a company that might not have outlasted its most elegant car without a large cash injection by Herbert Quandt (1910-1982), who became the major shareholder.

Modern BMW enthusiasts might be alarmed to discover, if they didn’t know already, that their favourite manufacturer was once saved from almost certain oblivion by a tiny car with a 697cc two-cylinder engine mounted behind the rear axle.

Available mostly as a saloon but also as a coupé (pictured) and a cabriolet, the 700 found nearly 190,000 buyers in six years – more than enough to make the company’s financial calamity a thing of the past. There has never been another BMW like it, but if it hadn’t existed there might never have been another BMW at all.

Seven years into the life cycle of the 02 Series, BMW introduced the 2002 Turbo, a car which introduced the concept of turbo lag to people who had not previously heard of it. Very powerful for its day, but also very thirsty, it arrived at exactly the wrong moment, just as the world entered a devastating oil crisis.

Today, BMW admits that it “had built a car as contrary to the spirit of the age as scarcely any car before”. The company called a halt after only 1672 2002 Turbos had been made, a tiny figure compared with the total 02 Series production run of 861,940.

BMW does not, of course, sell illegal cars, but it came close with the 3.0 CSL, a lightweight homologation special version of the E9 coupé built in just enough numbers to be allowed to compete in the European Touring Car Championship.

The specification included a very large rear wing which, at the time, was forbidden on German roads. BMW got round that by placing it in the luggage compartment. Since it was a standard part, it could, within the ETC rules, be fitted to the bootlid before taking to the tracks, where there was no legal issue.

The M1 was almost as shocking, to those easily shocked, as the 700 had been nearly 20 years earlier. Its 3.5-litre straight-six engine was mounted between the occupants and the rear axle, a layout BMW had never used before and would not return to until the i8 was introduced in 2014.

460 road-going examples were built, and many were used for racing, including the ProCar Championship (won by Niki Lauda in 1979 and Nelson Piquet in 1980), in which only M1s were allowed to compete.

Unlike later models of the same name, the first M5 gave almost no visual hint as to what it really was – namely one of the fastest four-door saloons you could buy, exceeding even the mighty M535i in the 5 Series line-up.

This deceptively ordinary-looking car was in fact powered by the same 3.5-litre engine used in the M1, which produced 282bhp and gave the M5 an impressive top speed of over 150mph.

It was easy to assume that the first 3 Series estate would be more practical than the saloon, but that’s not quite how things were. By BMW’s own figures, most of the saloons in the range had a luggage capacity, measured by the VDA method, of 425 litres, though in the case of the 325i this fell to 404 litres. In the Touring, the capacity was significantly inferior at 370 litres.

To be fair, if you folded down the rear seats the Touring’s figure increased spectacularly to 1125 litres, but reviewers at the time were quick to notice that, with a full set of passengers on board, the Touring could carry less luggage than any of the saloons.

The Z1 was a two-seat roadster like the 507, and therefore an indirect replacement for that much earlier car. It also stood in marked contrast with the original M5 in that it looked far faster than it was, its 170bhp 2.5-litre straight six engine being adequately, but not startlingly, powerful.

The Z1’s many intriguing features included doors which retracted downwards and body panels which could be replaced with a completely different set using no more than a well-handled screwdriver. BMW built around 8000 examples in three years and had no trouble selling any of them. 

Very little was known about the original M8 (which existed only as a prototype) until BMW officially revealed it in 2010. It then became clear what the world had been missing for two decades. Several power figures for its 6.0-litre V12 engine have been quoted by various sources, but BMW itself refers to a possible output of up to 640 metric horsepower, the equivalent of 631bhp. For reference, the current M8’s twin-turbo 4.4-litre V8 produces 616bhp.

BMW decided not to put anything like this into production, but says now that the car “would certainly have made waves around the globe had it been released”. No kidding. Environmental considerations were said to be behind it not being produced for sale. 

The second of BMW’s Z cars (for Zukunft, meaning ‘future’), and the first produced in large numbers, was offered with several engines, including some four-cylinder units with capacities of under 2.0 litres.

Contrasting views were expressed. Some people felt that smallest engines in the range were ridiculously weak, and quite unsuitable for a sporty BMW. Others said that Z3s fitted with them handled beautifully, and had a balance unmatched by the more powerful six-cylinder versions.

At first, all Z3s were roadsters, but after two years BMW introduced a coupé body style, available only with six-cylinder engines. For a coupé, the rear window was unusually close to being vertical, which made the car look like an estate, and led to it being nicknamed ‘breadvan’.

“This vehicle won’t be everyone’s darling,” said BMW executive Wolfgang Reitzle, and he was right. On the plus side, its luggage capacity was, at 410 litres, actually greater than that of the original 3 Series Touring.

Influenced partly by the 507 – a car BMW is certainly proud of, even if it wasn’t a sales success – the Z8 had an impressive power unit in the shape of the 4.9-litre V8 engine also used in the contemporary M5.

Opinions on how good it was vary widely. In a retrospective review, we described it as “such a wonderful-looking car; such a disappointment to drive”.

Now that everyone from Dacia to Rolls-Royce is producing SUVs, it’s difficult to imagine how weird it seemed when BMW brought out one of its own a quarter of a century ago.

Complaints that this was not the sort of vehicle BMW should have been building were drowned by praise for the X5 and well it handled on the road. Four generations on, it’s still with us today.

Modern criticism of how BMWs look began with the introduction of the fourth-generation 7 Series designed by chief designer Chris Bangle, whose distinctive rear end caused controversy at the time.

The 7 Series also brought the iDrive infotainment system to the world. Undoubtedly clever, it was criticised for being very difficult to use, at least in its original form.

The immediate to the successor to the Z3 was available as either a roadster or a coupé. This turned out to be a problem, as BMW later discovered. Coupé-convertibles, with retracting metal roofs, were becoming popular, and market research revealed that some potential buyers refused to consider a Z4 unless it had one of those.

Engineering this into an existing model was not a practical proposition. BMW instead made the next Z4, launched in 2009, a coupé-convertible, giving owners a choice of open-top or solid-roof motoring in the same car.

Available mostly as a small hatchback, though also as a coupé or a convertible, the 1 Series was the type of car which would have had front-wheel drive if almost anyone else had built it. BMW was a decade away from using this layout, so the power of whatever engine happened to be fitted was transferred to the road via the rear wheels instead.

As a result, various transmission components took up space which might otherwise have been available for passengers and luggage, but people who regarded front-wheel drive as the work of the devil reckoned that BMW had done the right thing.

In all three of its generations, the X6 has been a cross between a coupé and an SUV – a curious combination, but some people seem to like it. The difficulty of reconciling very different elements in the same vehicle was immediately apparent when the first generation was launched.

While praising its dynamics and good value, we described its looks as “challenging”, and added, “Seldom has a car divided opinion as much as this one. And seldom has so much of that opinion been negative.”

The i3 might have been frowned upon by people who don’t like electric cars, but at one point it was even more controversial within BMW. Wieland Bruch, who was involved in the project from the start, told us, “We had voices in the company saying that these engineers around the i3 are wasting all the money we have worked so hard to earn.”

While never a big seller (it found less than half as many customers as the Nissan Leaf), the i3 was ingenious, and its styling, while curious, never dated. When production ended in 2022, we were sorry to see it go.

This compact MPV’s name was bound to cause confusion, since BMW introduced an almost completely different coupé/convertible called the 2 Series at the same time.

Such matters paled by comparison, however, with the fact that the Active Tourer had front-wheel drive, a layout never before seen in a car with a BMW badge, and one the company had previously all but disparaged in its marketing. The switch was inevitable, though, and not difficult to achieve. The Active Tourer was based on the same platform used by Mini, a brand which BMW relaunched in 2001.

An extraordinary, and very aerodynamic, piece of design made the i8 appear worth every bit of its high purchase price (over £100,000 in the UK). It was undoubtedly quick, but critics pointed out that its narrow, hard-compound tyres meant the handling could be skittish, and the official fuel economy figure, on the high side of 130mpg, was little more than the stuff of dreams.

But nobody could deny that the i8 looked fantastic – and still does.

After nearly 30 years of producing M3s with screaming naturally-aspirated engines – an inline four, a straight six and most recently a V8 – BMW bowed to the inevitable in the fourth generation and introduced one with a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre six.

Inevitably, it sounded a little muffled compared with its predecessors, though there was no denying its ability at lower revs. “Just don’t expect the blown unit to offer up same razor-like throttle response or alluring aural qualities as the engine it replaces,” we said.

The sixth version of BMW’s luxury saloon was introduced in 2015 and facelifted four years later. Among other things, this involved increasing the size of the characteristic ‘kidney’ radiator grille to an alarming extent.

We thought it too large at the time, though we conceded that the new look gave the 7 Series “a more imperious disposition”.

By 2020, it was to be expected that a new BMW would look unconventional. The 4 Series – essentially a 3 Series saloon but offered as a two-door coupé or convertible or a five-door Gran Coupé – entered its second generation that year, and featured a grille whose “new, impactful design”, according to BMW, “draws attention to the front end of the model”.

“The design has widely divided opinions,” we said, “but, like it or loathe it, there is more to the second-generation model than its controversial styling.”

The huge, aggressive radiator grille on the front of the iX attracted what had become familiar comment, not least because the iX is an electric vehicle which doesn’t have a radiator at all, and therefore has no need of a grille.

In a 2022 interview, BMW CEO Oliver Zipse had an answer for this: “We don’t believe and we never believed that the drivetrain should dictate what a car should look like because it doesn’t depend on the drivetrain. It depends on the customer taste, customer behaviour, functions they would like to have, and that’s the foremost thing.”

In the interview mentioned previously, Oliver Zipse said of BMW’s controversial design strategy, “Of course it’s a plan, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.” He was speaking partly of the new 7 Series, which had not only the by now familiar but still very distinctive front grille treatment but split-level headlights as well.

Public reaction to this car was possibly no stronger than it had been to the 7 Series introduced in 2001, but compared to this one the much older model now looked inoffensive almost to the point of blandness.

The XM is only the second vehicle, after the M1, developed entirely by BMW’s M division, and is also that division’s first SUV and first petrol-electric hybrid. Furthermore, the Label version (pictured), with its combined output of 738bhp, is the most powerful road-going BMW ever sold to the public.

All that would be worthy of comment if the XM looked ordinary, which of course it doesn’t. “Even in images, this beady-eyed SUV is pretty challenging to behold,” we said. “But in the metal it’s brutal, almost shockingly unapologetic, which is exactly as M intended.”