BMW E84

This is the catalogue record of the BMW E84, 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 2009. 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 E84 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. 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 Jeep Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Tesla Tesla Roadster, the Nissan Nissan Leaf — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the BMW E84 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 2.0 L BMW N46#N46B20O1 / N46 Straight-four engine / I4 / 2.0 L BMW N20#N20B20 / N20 I4 Turbocharger / turbo / 3.0 L BMW N52#N52B30 / N52 St; kerb weight is recorded at 1430 -; drive goes through 6-speed Manual transmission / manual / 6-speed ZF 6HP transmission / ZF 6HP Automatic transmission / automatic / 8-speed ZF 8HP transmission / ZF 8HP Automatic transmission / autom; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive / Front-engine, all-wheel-drive (BMW xDrive / xDrive). 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 E84 sits alongside the BMW 116, the BMW 269, the BMW 3 Series, the BMW 3 Series. The record names the successor = BMW X1 (F48) as its predecessor and the BMW X1 (F48) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Richard Kim. Assembly is recorded at Germany: Leipzig / China: Shenyang (BMW Brilliance / BBA) / India: Chennai (BMW India) / Indonesia: Jakarta (Astra International / Gaya Motor) / Thailand: Rayong (BMW Manufacturing.

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 E84 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.