German Car Zone

If you're a golfer, you gotta love the gap wedge. Mine has 52 degrees of loft, and is good for about 100 yards barring any sort of operator error. It's called the gap wedge because it neatly fills the void between the sand wedge (80 yards on a good day) and pitching wedge (maybe 115 when the ball's sitting up nice).
Automotively speaking, BMW's latest gap wedge is the 335i Sedan, a perfect fit between the solid, reasonably quick 328i and the hell-for-leather M3. With a nice round 300 bhp and a like amount of torque from 2979 cc, it falls squarely between the 3 Series bookends (whose respective outputs are 230 bhp and most likely 400 bhp for the upcoming V-8-powered M3). And acceleration-wise, this latest sedan isn't far off the recently departed E46-body M3…our test subject clicked off a fleet 5.0-second trip to 60 mph, ripping through the quarter mile in 13.5. That's a fair fight with a Cadillac CTS-V.



Read more @: RoadandTrack.com

Great review.

0-60 in 5.0 seconds eh? Where are the Lexus fanboys?

BTW, looks really good in that color and with those wheels.

Let the ******* cry...

I'm really impressed by the 5sec. sprint figure. BMW really was being conservative with their performance claims.

As Marcus said, american magazines use torque braking take off technique.
So shouldn't really be a real world thing but impresive non the less.

Aside from the outright straight line speed, a slalon figure of 68.7 mph is damn good.

Thanks Saša

+1

whats up with the LEXUS Fans? My other friend has been going on about how the LS460 is faster to 100 then the 335i!! im like ***? are u okay

I eventually had to show him that race between the 335 and the M3 to bang sum sense into him....

poor lexus fans

5.0 second?!! That's an amazing time...

Very impressive numbers for the 335i. Road & Track is my favourite North American magazine for performance numbers because they are consistent in reporting their results (they always do a 700ft slalom run which is a much better indicator of actual handling than a skidpad number).

Here are numbers for comparable cars from the same magazine.

IS350/G35/335i/S4/M3/C55

0-60mph (s): 4.9/5.4/5.0/5.4/5.0/5.0
0-100mph (s): 12.7/13.5/12.3/13.6/12.0/11.9
1/4mile (s@mph): 13.5@103.1/13.9@101.8/13.5@104.5/13.9@101.2/13.5@105.8/13.5@106.6
skidpad (g): 0.84/0.88/0.90/0.86/0.87/0.86
700ft slalom (mph): 66.7/65.5/68.7/65.8/68.3/67.6

It takes the previous generation M3/C55 to match/come close to the performance of the current 335i, and it's only at higher speeds where the M3/C55 can pull away. It kills the S4 in everyway. And the IS350 is pretty damn good too. Numbers don't lie as much as people's personal biases.

Of course, all of these acceleration numbers were done with high rpm launches for the manual transmission cars, whereas the automatic IS350 and C55 are just press and go. Keep that in mind for everyday street encounters.

And one other thing.....it's sad to see that there is nothing in the immediate future from MB to take on the 335i or IS350 in its price range. Maybe Audi will come up with a powerful answer to the 335i/IS350 when the next A4 becomes available.