BMW 320td Compact - Crap with Craig

The cheap reliable hack.

Every man and their dog down in England likes to live a good hour or so from their actual workplace so they are jolly popular. But when on a budget, what do you pick? Well according to a colleague Mr Murray he’s been running the perfect one for the past couple of years. I hopped in one weekend to tell him how much of a fool he had been.

The truth is he’d completely forgotten he had shared his “car budget tracker” on Google Docs with me so I’d been following his foolishness like everyone else has watched me buy a PCP with not enough miles and absolutely wreck himself with excess mileage charges.

There’s always a good selection of cars available as hacks. V6, V8, V12 maybe? Normally aspirated? Should it be turbocharged? Maybe even supercharged? Wait. It’s going to be a 2.0 diesel isn’t it? Yes a BMW 320td. Apparently the T bit means it’s a compact. I can only assume therefore the T stands for tiny. The D must mean.. No. Stop. I refuse to make these silly height and length jokes. I’ll save them for later on.

The first thing you notice looking at the car is it seems to have been lowered, but only at the back. Mr Murray insists he has not touched the suspension apart from replacing all the springs, dampers and top mounts for an eye watering £500. I would tell him this was the definition of insanity, as he only spent £1300 on the whole car but the poor bloke does spend almost 2 hours a day in this thing.

It is therefore right that his arse may be cosseted in whatever way he sees fit.

Part of this was fitting some of a M-Sport optional seating pack as it’s crucial to have the correct lumbar support as you vigorously change lane on the motorway in the way that only BMW drivers do. I for one could just not get comfortable. They had an extendable squab to try and give you more under leg support and without mucking around too much, I couldn’t make it work. Further investigation was required but since the seat was probably set “just right” for his Mrs, being the gentleman I am, I refrained from changing it too much.

One thing the seats do allow you to do though is get quite low. Mr Murray proved this by completing the full Chris Harris and sitting with his eyes just above the top of the steering wheel. He does this for the obvious reason of keeping the weight as low as possible in the vehicle to allow even better lane changes on that windy motorway commute. It’s good he is a smaller chap as I being a tall bloke would struggle to get the chin close to the top of the steering wheel.

While inside, I had a good look round the cabin and came to the conclusion that the Germans of the early noughties enjoyed squares. Would you like a round dial to turn the climate control up or down? No, square button. Nice round knob to turn the stereo up or down? Yes actually. But you are only allowed that and some round dials. The rest must be square. I’m surprised they didn’t go all austin allegro and fit a square steering wheel or maybe a set of square wheels and tyres. Being German, they’d probably pull it off.

While gazing over the array of square buttons I was drawn to two rear window switches. This puzzled me. Rear window switches? It’s a 3-door. The rear windows don’t go down. They do however pop open. Electrically. Just think of the time and effort put into engineering making the rear windows pop out by an inch. It was roughly the same time as it took British Leyland to design the square steering wheel from the allegro I’m told.

Moving to the outside of the car there is one thing that BMW made round I really wish they had not. The bloody headlights. They ruin what is really, not that bad of looking car. The original compact had the normal 3-series front end but for the gen 2 compact that was apparently not allowed. BMW have a cracking history with quad front round lights but they cocked this right up. Maybe the original headlights were not very illuminating and they thought making it look like it was wearing a pair of spectacles would fix it?

Moving on to how it goes and it’s not all bad. Initially I was shocked at the lack of noise but then remembered I had just stepped out of a turbocharged MX-5 which was jolly loud. Lack of noise is good however as frankly, all 4 cylinder diesels make a terrible racket.

The engine is fairly standard too. Mr Murray has had it mapped by a “reputable man” (someone yob with a laptop who maintains his tune will give you 3 times the original torque output). No matter what you do to this era of diesel they all deliver their power in a lump before you have to quickly change gear and do it all over again. Not the most inspiring drive but it was never intended to be.

What it was intended to do however was be efficient and it’s damn good at that. 55mpg is easily achievable at BMW motorway speeds of roughly get out of my way. Even when Mr Murray is on it, it’s as efficient as a Kenyan marathon runner, only taking the minimum energy to do the job.

An example of this was on the last bank holiday Monday. We were all out for a early morning hoon in our ramshackle array of vehicles. Over the morning the BMW managed a solid 35mpg. I on the other hand in my 2 litre petrol turbo Jag managed an impressively low 12mpg. Fair enough the Jag is a quicker and much heavier car. But it’s not 3 times as quick or heavy.

One other item noted on the hoon was the little trail of black smoke. You know. The one that comes out the exhaust just to let you know you are following a diesel. Don’t think rolling coal. Think more Winston Churchill having a cigar. Only without the class.

Finally, how is Mr Murray doing on the old total spend? Well if you include the £1300 for the car, his total spend is on £4000 which a fair chunk of was for the suspension overhaul. Other big jobs include a new clutch and flywheel and many many tyres. They are all top bits fitted though. Pilot Sports are the order of the day for tyres for example. Over the 45,000 miles completed in the car and so far it’s not let him down. Could you have got a super cheap new car on PCP with that mileage? Probably. But then every man and his dog has one of them. Oh wait.