BMW 3-Series Touring – 330e xDrive M Sport
One of the ‘go-to’ cars for go-getters making progress on the way up the corporate ladder, driving a BMW 3 Series is almost a rite of passage and having one on your drive is a sure sign of someone who is quite comfortably off and is making some significant headway in their career of choice.
That’s no bad thing. There’s a reason the BMW 3 Series is so popular as a watershed status symbol. It’s not a cheap car. Driving one marks you out as someone who can afford to drive something better and it IS better. Well engineered, with high end technology and wonderfully balanced and engaging driving dynamics. The BMW 3 Series is big enough to seat a car full of fellow executives in style and comfort, as well as making sure the chairman of the board is suitably pampered on pickup from the airport.
To say the 3-series is a bit of an icon in its own right isn’t to overstate things, but as with all vehicles to have earned that iconic status over decades, times change and cars must change too.
SUV’s weren’t always all the rage. Before the roads were full of jacked up ‘off roaders’ and ‘soft-roaders’ the estate car was the defacto choice for a more spacious cabin. Whether that was for carrying 4 colleagues and everyone’s complete golf club collection, or the entire family big-shop (complete with jumbo pushchair), estate cars were, and are, exceptionally practical and in the case of the 3-series touring, desirable as well.
Back in the day when ‘estate’ was usually conflated with ‘Volvo’, BMW eschewed that monicker in favour of the less frumpy sounding ‘Touring’ and has stuck with it ever since. The 3 Series Touring then, is everything a regular BMW 3-Series should be and quite literally more besides. There’s the same keen driving dynamics, the reassuringly expensive everything, some of the latest gadgets to show off to your passengers and just a little more space at the back. It’s little wonder that, even when estates are fewer in number, BMW’s take on the bodystyle hasn’t fallen out of fashion. It’s just THAT good.
BMW 3-Series Touring – 330e xDrive M Sport – The Most Desirable Mid Size Beemer?
Across any product range, there will always be a collection of levels. Badges, power outputs etc to mark a car out as being a little higher up the pecking order than other, superficially similar vehicles. Here at Westwood, you can always rely on us to go the extra mile with upgrades and options, ensuring that in any comparison, a Westwood vehicle is probably going to see you winning any ‘who’s got the best car-athon’. Our 3-series touring variant of choice for example, is the spectacular BMW 3-Series Touring – 330e xDrive M Sport. Meaning that this car has the hugely desirable M-sport accessories which provide style and sportiness to the look and underpinnings. There’s also the xDrive ‘badge’ which marks this stunning estate out as having an ‘all wheel drive’ system, unlike half the SUV’s on the road which pretend to be ‘off-roaders’ (but which only have 2 wheel drive).
The 330 bit shows our BMW’s have a higher power output, but the ‘e’ bit though? Simple, that’s the designation to show it’s a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid to be precise. Sure you’ll get a little over 30 miles on a full charge and the ‘official’ fuel economy is over 166 miles per gallon as a result (technically you could get ‘infinite mpg’ if you never let the battery go flat), but mostly, this is just a way to get the emissions rating down to a negligable 36 g/km which makes the benefit in kind company car tax SUPER low. Perfect for a car mostly driven by company car users. It looks (and IS) expensive, but works out cheap in all the ways that matter to the business user target audience. Particularly if it’s taken on long term car hire where the VAT can be claimed back and the hire itself is a deductable expense. Run it as a fleet car and all of a sudden it’s a budget car that can do 0-60 in just over 5 seconds.
BMW 3 Series Long Term Hire or Buy/Lease As A Nearly New Used Car For Sale?
Vehicles on our fleet are rotated quickly. We buy vehicles in brand new, they go out (usually on long term hire to a single business customer) and when they come back, they get sold as barely used bargains. On average, if it’s a year old or more, it’s for sale or lease!
Our BMW 3 Series Touring models are no different. While they’re always going to be available brand new for low cost flexible hire or contract hire, (they’re just THAT popular) this means we also have them available as barely used cars to buy or lease, so there’s always going to be a high spec’ BMW you can drive away, no matter how you want to run your car.
