Sedans and a single wagon comprise updated range arriving late year.

ONCE the sales stalwart, nowadays outsold in NZ by almost all its sports utili… erm, ‘activity’ .. models, the 3-Series passenger car nonetheless remains an important model to BMW here, with no thought of letting it go.

On occasion of international unveiling of a mid-life facelift for the current sedan and Touring (Munich-speak for ‘station wagon’), BMW New Zealand has been quick off the mark to assure some of the enhanced cars are coming here, with availability from December.

Auckland headquarters has also reminded the Three accounted for 11.5 percent of its total registrations in 2021, and that 6833 have been registered locally since 2002. Which sounds grand, until you see that the X3 alone has exceeded the same overall count in under half the time.

Anyway, the new models are identified by subtle aesthetic changes – slimmer headlamps with full-LED illumination now standard (with option to upgrade to Adaptive LED lights, denoted by blue highlights), a modest-redesign of the same-sized (so, not over-large) grille, new front and rear bumpers, 17-inch alloys or larger - and a significantly new interior featuring BMW's latest technology.

Those will be seen on a wholly our-cylinder family, comprising 320i, 330e plug-in hybrid and M340i xDrive sedans, plus a 320d xDrive Touring.

The ‘TwinPower’ petrol is a flexible thing; in the base car it makes 135kW/400Nm, rising to 218kW/420Nm in the 330e, and 285kW/500Nm in the M340i. The 320d churns out 140kW/400Nm. The hybrid is both quick (0-100kmh in 5.8 seconds) and Green, with emissions from just 30g/km. The official electric range is as high as 62km. There is an all-electric variant of the 3 Series in production, but that is only for the Chinese market.

The big power lift is to the processing power, required because the car has picked up the Curved Display dashboard style that has been slowly permeating through the BMW family.

In the 3 Series, it incorporates a 12.3-inch display for the instruments in front of the driver and a 14.9-inch touchscreen in the middle of the car.

This runs BMW's Operating System 8 and is crammed with the latest in connectivity features, right up to integrated 5G, using BMW’s voice-activated ‘Intelligent Personal Assistant’.