BMW E30

This is the catalogue record of the BMW E30, one of 299 models BMW has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1982. 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 E30 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. 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 Nissan Nissan Micra, the Opel Opel Corsa, the Porsche Porsche 944 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the BMW E30 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 1.6-1.8 L BMW M10 / M10 Straight-four engine / I4 / 1.6-1.8 L BMW M40 / M40 I4 / 1.8 L BMW M42#M42B18 / M42 Multi-valve / 16v I4 / 2.0-2.5&; kerb weight is recorded at 1080 -; drive goes through 4-speed Manual transmission / manual / 5-speed manual / 3-speed ZF 3HP22 transmission / ZF 3HP Automatic transmission / automatic / 4-speed ZF 4HP22 transmission / ZF 4HP automatic; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout / Rear-wheel drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive layout / All-wheel drive (325iX only). 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. Production is recorded at 2,339,520 units, which makes it one of the industry's true mass-production stories.

Its place in the BMW story

Within BMW's own catalogue the BMW E30 sits alongside the BMW 116, the BMW 269, the BMW 3 Series, the BMW 3 Series. The record names the BMW 3 Series (E21) as its predecessor and the BMW 3 Series (E36) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Claus Luthe, Boyke Boyer. Assembly is recorded at West Germany: Munich; Regensburg / South Africa: Rosslyn (BMW SA).

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.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the BMW E30 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.