How To Change Your BMW E46 M3's Stock Head Unit To Apple CarPlay

If you’ve been a CT lurker for the past year, you’ll know that I’m the extremely fortunate owner of a 2004 BMW E46 M3. And while I’ve now added to my garage with a tuned R35 Nissan GT-R (more on that very soon), I decided it was time to scrap the old head unit in the M3 and replace it with something a little more this decade.

I got on the phone to in-car media specialists Alpine UK, who had an ILX-700 Apple CarPlay unit in stock and offered to fit it for me. The resulting vlog shows Mitch (Alpine’s technician and audio guru) taking out the old nav unit and hard drives located in the boot, fixing my busted right-hand speakers and saving me some weight by installing the ILX unit and iPhone dock.

The best part? Not only can I now listen to music on Spotify in my 12-year-old car, but there’s an ultra-cool Car Throttle logo that appears when I fire up that straight-six. So I can safely say that this E46 M3 is now truly one-of-a-kind…