Some cars are ahead of their time, the BMW E31 certainly is one of them. Look at it in 2017 and you might think it just came out. It's a timeless design of a few lines and a pilar-less coupe shape that is to this day gracious and beautiful.
The car was heavy, complicated, for its age super digitized and combined a lot of world firsts in a production car. It featured 4 wheel steering (850CSi), the first ever electronic stability control system (DSC) and it was the first car with CAN-Bus in which all relevant vehicle systems are combined into a centralized BUS system. It was everything and anything that could be done at the time realized in one low, wide and very sleek GT coupe designed for relaxed high speed long distance hauls.
It also is probably the most underappreciated car BMW ever made. Its reputation for being 'impossible to fix', 'super expensive to maintain' and generally 'not very fast' made it a flop commercially.
20 years later people are beginning to appreciate what the company tried to do here. It isn't trying to be the fastest or cheapest. It simply does everything it was designed to do exceptionally well, refined, quiet and sophisticated.
Get in one today and you'll feel like you're in a 2017 model. THAT is the magic of this car - Entwicklung 31 - epic for years to come.
On a personal note I've photographed thousands of cars over the years mostly whenever I get the chance I look for advantageous angles and snap away. When did this start you might ask? It started here with this car. In 2009 for the firs time I had a cellphone camera that was actually capable of taking quality photos.
It was an awkward ASUS Windows Phone but with a quite impressive camera. So when I saw this car parked at the side of the road I quickly jumped out of my car and took a tour around the thing snapping away. I follow this approach to this day to get a full 360 degree impression in the attempt to capture whatever aspect of the design is the defining characteristic. I only found these images again recently on a rather bid SD card and was amazed at what I found on it.
The car you see here by the way is not a 850CSi but instead an 840Ci with the M-Package and 18" BMW M rims which were optional for the 850CSi and the E38 7 series.
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