2007 Bmw 530i One Owner Fully Loaded! Low Reserve, 17 Inch Wheels Moonroof $ave! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

BMW rethinks all-wheel-drive M cars

BMW M hasn't been able to decide whether it wants to jump on the all-wheel-drive bandwagon or not (with the exceptions of the X5 M and the X6 M, which are based on AWD architecture). That might be changing though, since M's president Friedrich Nitschke recently realized that 70 to 80 percent of Mercedes-Benz E63 AMGs are ordered with all-wheel drive. Earlier this year, Nitschke said that there were no new AWD M models planned, so this comes as somewhat of a surprise.
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive, but it won't come before we get the successor of the M5 and M6," Nitschke said in a Motoring report. "That's the timing and it's not practical to react in the current life cycles."
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive." - Friedrich Nitschke, BMW

Watch this BMW take flight at Viru Rally

An E36 BMW 3 Series might be a good choice for a lot of purposes - a long road trip, a track day, rallycross, impressing your friends... but a full-on rally? It's rear-drive when the best rally machines are front- or all-wheel drive. But that didn't stop Pritt Koik and Alari-Uku Heldna from entering their stripped-out E36 in the Viru Rally in Estonia... or from getting some big air time when they did.
Fortunately the jump was not just caught on video... it was caught on video from three angles: two from the side of the rally stage and one from inside the cockpit. Check out all three below to see how this particular BMW got back into the aircraft business.

BMW names new head of M division

BMW's performance division has been run by Dr. Friedrich Nitschke since 2011, developing, among other products, the new M3 and M4. But soon the good doctor will be retiring, and BMW has just named his successor.
Taking Nitschke's place as chairman of BMW M GmbH will be Franciscus van Meel (pictured at right), who until recently served as managing director of Audi Quattro GmbH - the rival outfit that makes Ingolstadt's performance models, including the R8 supercar and RS line of performance models.
Van Meel will join BMW on October 1, presumably to learn the ropes from Nitschke before the 59-year-old executive steps down at the end of the year. Back in January, Audi named Heinz Peter Hollwerweger as head of Quattro GmbH and reassigned van Meel to its Beijing R&D center, a role which evidently didn't suit him as well as creating Autobahn-storming German muscle cars.