[gee-m-w]

I'm traveling this week and I have a 328i from a rental car company at the airport. It doesn't have the sport package or sport line trim. It's probably about a $40,000 sticker, no more than $43k. Has navigation. Doesn't have sirius. Black leatherette on flat black exterior.

I'm not a big fan of the iDrive. The map is pretty unusable. It can't really query locations; you need to look up the exact address on your phone and painstakingly type it in with the wheel, one field at a time. The 3D boxes for buildings look nothing like the real skyline or landscape. I've seen better systems in the Mercedes E class that have real renders of, for example, every hotel in Las Vegas.

The 2.0L turbo engine doesn't sound very luxurious when you fire it up from a cold start. Then it quiets down and it sounds normal. Acceleration is pretty good in low gears. It really hustles in 2nd. The start/stop is annoying. Do they make a replacement button that automatically disables it? It's kind of a lot to do the startup sequence of 1) put keys in cup holder 2) hit start button 3) hit sport button 4) disable start/stop 5) pull AT lever while holding hot key to reverse 6) slide AT lever into sport position.

The handling is nice and the steering is excellent like any BMW would be. The non sport suspension is a little bit squishy but some higher rate springs would fix that.

The trunk seems like it got smaller since the e90, but I may be forgetting.

The dash is growing on me. I like the way it looks at night. Even with iDrive knob there are still a lot of buttons on the steering wheel and on the dash. The "next station" button is farthest from the driver. The volume and change channel wheels on the steering wheel have a nice feel but advance slowly.

I'm still a bigger fan of the M5 cabin, but I might like this cabin in M3 trim. I'm definitely a sedan person.