As usual BMW claims that it’s an all-new car and that every panel is different from the saloon’s. But it still looks dull. You’d only really want to get inside it if you were being chased by an armed gang from Shining Path.

And then, when you did get inside, you’d want to get right back out again. In other coupés, from say, Alfa Romeo and Audi, you get all sorts of fancy bits and bobs, but not in the Beemer. Here you get exactly the same dash that you find in the saloon. It’s as dull and as featureless as the inside of a Cheeky Girl’s head.

At first glance, then, I could not — and would not — bring myself to buy this car. And certainly not for £33,420, which is a damn sight more than you’re asked to pay for a Mazda RX-8.

Yes, the rear seats in the BMW are as big as a sofa, and yes, the days when BMW made you pay extra for windows are gone. But even so, £33,420 for a car that doesn’t even look as good as a Hyundai? You’d have to be mad.

And there’s more to worry about, because although it says 335 on the back it doesn’t have a 3.5 litre engine. What you get instead is a 3 litre straight six, which is force-fed its diet of air by two small turbochargers.

On paper this sounds fine. Because they’re small, they don’t take an age to reach operating speed, which means there’s no turbo lag.


But because each one is feeding only three cylinders, you still have loads of power and loads of torque.

The worry is that BMW may have fallen into the same trap as Volkswagen, which tried a similar two-stage system on the Golf GT I reviewed recently. That didn’t work at all. It was horrid and jerky and pointless.

In the BMW, though, there are no problems at all. If you really, really concentrate you still cannot tell it’s turbocharged. Put your foot down and immediately there’s a meaty, almost diesel-esque shove in the back. But where a diesel would be out of puff after a moment or two, the Beemer just keeps on accelerating in a wall of subdued fury — for about nine and a half weeks.

This engine is little short of a masterpiece. There’s so much low-down grunt that even the BMW traction control system — a good one normally — is regularly woken from its electronic slumber by the wave of torque.

And of course it’s all fitted to a perfectly balanced chassis with the usual array of excellent steering, fine brakes and a nicely chosen balance between comfort and handling.

As a driver’s car, then, this is yet another winner. But I still wouldn’t buy one.

You need to think of it as a painting by the world’s greatest artist. Yes, the brush strokes are magnificent. Yes, the texture is superb. Yes, the perspective is world class and the detailing is better than you’d get from Leonardo.

But what he’s actually painted in this case is big dog turd.