BMW E23

Among the 299 BMW entries in the MotorJury library, the BMW E23 holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1977. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the BMW E23 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Lotus Cars Lotus Esprit, the Ford Ford Fiesta, the GM (General Motors) Saab 900 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the BMW E23 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.5–3.2 L BMW M30 / M30 Straight-six engine / I6 / 3.2 L BMW M30#M102 / M102 Turbocharger / turbo I6 / 3.4 L BMW M30#M106 / M106 turbo I6 / 3.5 L BMW M88#M90 / ; kerb weight is recorded at 1470 -; drive goes through 4-speed manual transmission / manual / 5-speed Getrag manual / 3-speed automatic transmission / automatic / 4-speed automatic; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the BMW story

Within BMW's own catalogue the BMW E23 sits alongside the BMW 116, the BMW 269, the BMW 3 Series, the BMW 3 Series. The record names the BMW E3 as its predecessor and the BMW 7 Series (E32) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Paul Bracq, Manfred Rennen. Assembly is recorded at West Germany: Dingolfing / South Africa: Rosslyn, Gauteng.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the BMW E23 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.