Spy Shots: BMW's Answer to the Audi A5 Sportback is the 3-Series Gran Turismo

You just got to hand it to die Deutschen for their imagination and über clever marketing tactics.

What Japanese carmakers simply called liftbacks and the French didn't even bother naming differently as most of their family cars featured a sloping tailgate anyway (Citroen BX, Renault 25 etc.), the Germans came up with all sorts of fancy names.

For example, Audi calls its five-door vehicles with a top-hinged liftgate "Sportback" while BMW went one-step further baptizing its own lineup with the sporty sounding "Gran Turismo" moniker, which is a smart move if you think about it. I mean, would you be interested in a car called the 3-Series Liftback GLi?

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Scoop: 2013 BMW 3-Series Touring Loses the Heavy Camo

With the market launch of the new F30 3-Series sedan well underway, there's no point of BMW overdoing it with the camouflage on the soon to be revealed Touring variant, a prototype of which was caught by our scoopers while testing in Europe.

These photos afford us our best view yet of the new 3-Series Touring that follows the practice of its predecessors choosing style over substance.

That doesn't mean you won't find a little more cargo room at the back which can be accessed easier thanks to the tailgate, but don't expect it to be a load-lugger in the traditional sense.

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AC Schnitzer to Showcase BMW 3-Series F30 Performance Program in Geneva

Joining ABT Sportsline at next month's Geneva Motor Show is another well-known tuning company from Germany, BMW-specialist AC Schnitzer.

The German tuner will use the Swiss auto show to present a variety of styling and performance parts for the new 2012 BMW 3-Series sedan, which is also known by its internal codename F30.

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BMW Introduces New M Performance Parts Program, Includes Engine Upgrades

There's a lot to see from many automakers at this year's Geneva Auto Show, including a raft of new models from the BMW brand, which will introduce the new 6-Series Grand Coupe, the facelifted X6 and X6M, the new M6 Coupe, X5 M50d, X6 M50d M550d xDrive sedan and Touring along with several new engines for the 1-Series, 3-Series and X3.

That's quite a handful but we're not done yet. The Bavarian firm will also showcase the latest 3-Series sedan, the i3 hatchback and i8 sports coupe concepts (all of which we've already seen before) and in a world premiere, the new BMW M Performance accessory program, which brings us to this post.

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BMW Wins Another Contract to Supply Munich's Police with Patrol Cars

For the past 50 years, the BMW Group has been providing patrol cars to the German city of Munich and this tradition continues with a new contract that will see the automaker supplying several hundred vehicles a year to the Bavarian Police.

Under the new deal, BMW will produce specially modified versions of its new 2012 3-Series sedan and its upcoming Touring sibling, along with the 5-Series sedan and Touring models, and for the first time ever, the X3 crossover as well.

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M.I.A.'s New Bad Girls Video Clip Looks up to Arabian Drifting

Bet you weren't expecting Arabian style drifting (called hagwalah) to find its way into a mainstream music video clip from a British female rapper. Yet all this took place in M.I.A.'s brand new song called "Bad Girls" which fuses the sounds of Middle Eastern music with rap lyrics.

The 36-year old singer of Sri Lankan descent, whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, filmed the entire music video in the Middle East showing local drivers with a selection of European cars like the Alfa Romeo 156 and the BMW 3-Series hagwalah-ing.

Drift over the break to watch the music clip.

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BMW gets Playful with Six New Ads, Two of Which will Air during the Super Bowl

While BMW wants to keep its signature motto "Ultimate Driving Machine" alive, it also desires to attract a younger crowd with its marketing efforts on the brand-new 2012 3-Series sedan.

Hence the playful nature of its new U.S. campaign, which comprises six short commercials, two of which will air on TV during Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday.

The 15 and 30 second ads were created by 'Kirschenbaum, Bond, Senecal + Partners', and all of them demonstrate some of the new technologies that have been incorporated into the latest 3-Series in a humorous manner. You can watch all of them right after the break.

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Cadillac ATS' Super Bowl Ad Tells Everyone who Doesn’t Believe it Can Beat the 3-Series to go to "Green Hell"

Unlike Cadillac's previous failed attempts, the all-new ATS sedan was designed from a clean sheet to compete squarely against the best Germany has to offer in the executive compact sedan segment, namely the BMW 3-Series sedan – and possibly, the rest of the Bavarian model's range later on.

And if there's one thing GM's premium brand has been touting about the ATS more than anything else since it began teasing the car last summer, it's the fact that it's handling and driving dynamics were honed at the Nürburgring race track in Germany, which as most of you already know, is nicknamed "The Green Hell".

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Spy Shots: BMW Continues Work on the New 3-Series / 4-Series Coupe

These new spy photos plopped in our inbox today affording us a fresh look at the next BMW 3-Series Coupe, which may or may not be called the 4-Series. Regardless of the name, one thing's for sure: the two-door model will be based on the sixth generation of the 3-Series sedan.

Leaving aside the first 3-Series, codenamed E21, which was only offered as a two door model anyway, with the exception of the 1980s E30 model, all the rest of the 3-Series Coupes featured significant styling changes over their four-door counterparts.

This tradition will continue with the new F32 model that will share very few, if any, body panels with the four-door sedan. If you look at the pictures that follow, you'll see that the F32 has typical coupe proportions with long front doors and a lower greenhouse that is heavily slanted towards the back.

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BMW Introduces New 320i with 184-horses Plus 316d and 318d in Europe

The newly launched F30 2012 BMW 3-Series sedan has just welcomed three new models into its range in Europe with the presentation of one petrol version, the 320i, and a pair of diesel variants, the 316d and 318d.

The 320i is the second four-cylinder turbocharged petrol model after the 328i. In fact, it shares a detuned version of the latter's 2.0-liter inline-four with direct injection, twin-scroll turbocharging, double-Vanos variable camshaft timing and Valvetronic variable valve timing technologies.

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U Spy: 2012 BMW 3-Series F30 Sedan Prepped up with M Performance Parts

During a special dealer presentation in Europe, BMW showed off its brand-new 2012 3-Series Sedans fitted with the yet to be released to the public, M Performance and Accessories parts.

One of our readers was on hand and was able to snag some cell phone pictures of the two F30s on display.

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Run, Little Red Bimmer, Run! Man Chases his Runaway BMW

There's a reason why automakers fit your car with a handbrake. Now, if only certain drivers could actually remember to use it…

On the other hand, if all drivers were diligent enough to use their vehicle's handbrake, we wouldn't have the opportunity to watch this suited up owner of an E46 BMW 3-Series sedan chasing his runaway car (possibly chanting "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there") before it hit a busy road causing some major damage.

You can view the video after the jump.

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BMW Driver Threatens to Sue Lancashire Council over Proposed 20MPH Speed Limit Because it May Damage her Car's Engine

Last October, UK Transport Secretary Philip Hammond suggested increasing the national highway speed limit from 70 to 80mph (112 to 128 km/h). His argument was that laws should reflect today’s reality and that cutting journey times would have a positive effect on the environment.

Apparently, this comes at a price. In exchange for supporting this plan, 27 local authorities want to enforce a 20 mph (32 km/h) on all roads passing through residential areas, with the exception of major through-routes, by 2013.

The Daily Mail reports that Diane Greenwood, an owner of a BMW 320d, says that if the 20 mph limit is imposed in her home county of Lancashire, she will sue the local council for damages caused to her car!

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Brooklyn Designer Creates Autodromo Watch Line Inspired by Car Instrument Gauges

Bradley Price is 31-year-old product designer from Brooklyn, New York, with a special passion for cars and a pretty creative mind. Combine those two and you get an interesting mix.

A couple of years ago, while driving his red 1983 Alfa Romeo GTV6 2.5 (yes, he's our kind of guy), Price had an inspiration: design a line of watches loosely inspired by sports car instrument panel gauges. Upon returning home, Price went to the drawing board and began rendering watch faces based on car gauges he admired.

The Brooklyn native continued to work on the designs of both the watch faces and casings and ended up creating a new company named Autodromo for his products.

“There are so many wonderful gauge designs from the 1960s and ’70s that I love,” Price told the New York Times in a recent interview. “I did some research and saw that no one was doing that for watches.”

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SPIED: 2013 BMW 3 or 4 Series Convertible with Retractable Hardtop

Until BMW makes an official statement on what it has decided to name the replacements for today's 3-Series Coupe and Convertible models, we'll have to keep using both the 3- and 4-Series monikers to describe the two-door body styles of the Bavarian maker's most popular model.

Over the past few months and aside from the official presentation of the sedan in October, we have shown you spy shots of the next M3 sedan, the 3-Series Touring, the 3 or 4-Series Coupe, and the 3- or 4-Series Gran Turismo fastback, but this is the first time we're sharing scoops of the Convertible model.

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SPY SHOTS: Six-Cylinder BMW M3 F30 Sedan Spotted on the Road

With the unveiling of the 2012 BMW 3 Series sedan all done and dusted, the Bavarian automaker's engineers have now turned their focus on the other variants of the F30 series including the flagship M3 sedan that was captured by our spies testing on the streets of Germany in a fairly light disguise.

While BMW has done its best to hide the most telling styling features of the M3 such as the shape of the front and rear bumpers, the pictures expose the car's muscular front and rear fenders that house larger alloy wheels and brake sets, as well as the beefier rocker panels.

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Mechanical Synfonica is an Ode to Orchestra and Fast Cars with a Pinch of Good-looking Women

While fast cars and beautiful women are a match made in heaven, producer Alexander Sperr and director Daniel Michaelis took a slightly different turn with their latest clip by incorporating the classic sounds from a symphony orchestra into the mix.

The cars featured in the video are a modified Audi S5 and a BMW 3-Series [E92]. While we can't say that we're too enthusiastic about the editing of the video which was allegedly shot at the Stelvio Pass in Italy, the clip is worth a few minutes of your time. You can check it out after the break.

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Polish Video Awesomeness: BMW E30 Gymkhana Style

Ken Block's Gymkhana? Sure, it's cool and all but for those of you that want to see something different and out of the PR-ordinary [...] for a change and one that does not include a Ford Fiesta for the umpteenth time, some chaps over from Poland have readied a pretty interesting video that you may want to watch.

For starters, it's more like a short film and an impressive one at that – though we could have done without the black filters.

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Tokyo Show: New BMW Alpina B3 GT3 is One Mean Green Machine

Famed BMW tuning house Alpina showed up at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show with a world premiere, the limited edition B3 GT3 of which only 99 examples will be built, each carrying a price tag of €90.000 (approx. US$120,000) in Germany.

The B3 GT3 is based on the regular 3-Series Coupe and it uses a slightly modified version the 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged inline-six found in Alpina's B3 S Bi-Turbo sedan, coupe and touring models.

Thanks to a different exhaust system and a titanium rear silencer made by Akrapovic the three-liter unit gains 8 more ponies lifting output to 408-horses at 6,000rpm and 540Nm (398 lb-ft) of torque at 4500rpm.

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BMW USA Puts a Price Tag on the All-New 2012 3-Series Sedan

BMW has just released U.S. pricing on its new 3-Series saloon, which will make its North American debut at the Detroit Motor Show in January and arrive in showrooms across the States next February as a 2012 model.

The new 328i, which swaps the current model's naturally aspirated 3.0-liter inline-six for a turbo'd four-cylinder powerplant, will be priced from $35,795, while the 2012 335i Sedan that continues with a turbocharged-six carries an MSRP of $43,295.

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