RE: Tell Me I'm Wrong: BMW Z8
Discussion
TJS10 said:
Interesting to note CRAIG's Z1 "was not a nice driving car". I can only assume there was something wrong with it. I drive a Z1 and it is handling is neutral with a compliant ride. It is great fun to drive.
^^ What he said! I've had two Z1s and, whilst there are perhaps several criticisms that can be levelled at a Z1 (like any car), "not a nice driving car" really isn't one of them. Actually, it's considered to be one of the finest-handling BMWs which given it's a front-mid-engined car with a bespoke chassis, near 50/50 weight distribution and the first production usage of BMW's fabled Z-axle, reeally shouldn't be surprising. Sure, the Z1 is not quick by today's standards and on track it will roll quite noticeably in corners but the body roll cannot detract from the innate ability of the chassis. Per the photo below, I once took my first Z1 on a track day at Bedford and one of the instructors took it out for a few laps out of curiosity. He came back full of praise for the car's chassis balance - he clearly hadn't been expecting it.
As for the Z8, it really is a very pretty car and I can forgive it entirely for being a boulevardier myself. After all, it really doesn't look like the sort of car you'd pick for a max attack B-road blast - it definitely looks more of a coast road cruiser. But at £100k+, prices are getting very ridiculous. That said, I wish similar inflation would suddenly hit Z1 prices!
ES335 said:
Can we rehabilitate the E31 next please - seriously.
Yes we can! I have these two low mileage 840 Sports tucked away,and i think they are a good investment and a very underestimated car,as i said imo the Z1 was not the best driving car but each to their own,some slate the 840's which i love and think is a great driving car other than the brakes..! and as for the Z8 i owned and still wish i had not sold for obvious reasons,but selling "anything" that rises in value many years later isn't a loss.?
CRA1G said:
Yes we can! I have these two low mileage 840 Sports tucked away,and i think they are a good investment and a very underestimated car,as i said imo the Z1 was not the best driving car but each to their own,some slate the 840's which i love and think is a great driving car other than the brakes..! and as for the Z8 i owned and still wish i had not sold for obvious reasons,but selling "anything" that rises in value many years later isn't a loss.?
Might take a while until that gamble pays off me think. Historically the really big barges never caught on and the E31 - nice as it is - was never the car it should have been. Too lardy and too complex. greggy50 said:
What sort of prices did the reach I am sure 5/6 years ago they were more like 40k instead of the 100 or so they seem to be now...
They were 50-60K in 2011, I was very close to buying one then. A gorgeous car, ideal for a fast comfortable intercontinental cruise-for-two in sunny weather. For various reasons I didn't go ahead, but if I'd bought it, with prices escalating so quickly to well over £100k, it's likely that I'd now be crystallising my winnings and swapping it for an Alfa 8C.
macfly said:
To answer the headline of the article I dropped by to tell Chris why he's wrong. At over 100 replies in I doubt he'll ever read my response, but here goes anyway.
I run the owners board for the Z8, and have done since 2001 - www.bmwz8.us -
To really understand what the Z8 is about have a look at the Drives section of our forum.
Contrary to some of the uninformed opinion expressed here the Z8 is an absolute joy to drive, I've had 4, and done around 50,000 combined miles in them. During that time I've also had an e46 M3, a GT3 an Elise and an Exige as my track cars, and done over 200 track days, so you could say I'm a serious a driver. In fact the reason I moved from the UK to California was for the roads. I fell in love with it when I came for the first US 500cc MotoGP back in 1988. Between Los Angeles and Laguna Seca, one of the great local destinations, are 350 miles of incredible open roads, which you can take going through all of four little villages. You can't find those kinds of beautifully engineered fast open roads with no reason to slow down anywhere in Europe, and I know because I drove all over the it on many different sportbikes as a kid.
With little effort the Z8 can be made to handle and go like a supreme high speed GT, exactly what it was meant to be, and it is an amazing platform from which to enjoy some of the most beautiful roads in the world. Chris is also dead wrong about the SL500 having better driving dynamics, I can say that because for the last five years I've had an SL500 as my daily driver. It's fine, but dead and boring as hell to take on a nice back road.
So why are the prices going up? Because it is an amazing and super fun car to drive on a beautiful day (we get about 300 of a year out here ;-) and a real practical classic, something all us original owners always knew it would become.
So, Chris, to see why you're wrong and really get an insight into the Z8 spend some time on our forum.
A little late to the party here, but I'm with you macfly and having what may be the highest miles Z8 in the world, I think I may be a bit of an authority on the topic! First off my first post here, so I thank you Chris for bringing up a great topic and while I'm going to tell you you're wrong, I think you may have concluded that yourself before you finished writing. I run Classic Car Club Manhattan where we have had a Z8 in the fleet for 6 years and covered nearly 100k miles (110k miles total now) and I think it's absolutely brilliant.I run the owners board for the Z8, and have done since 2001 - www.bmwz8.us -
To really understand what the Z8 is about have a look at the Drives section of our forum.
Contrary to some of the uninformed opinion expressed here the Z8 is an absolute joy to drive, I've had 4, and done around 50,000 combined miles in them. During that time I've also had an e46 M3, a GT3 an Elise and an Exige as my track cars, and done over 200 track days, so you could say I'm a serious a driver. In fact the reason I moved from the UK to California was for the roads. I fell in love with it when I came for the first US 500cc MotoGP back in 1988. Between Los Angeles and Laguna Seca, one of the great local destinations, are 350 miles of incredible open roads, which you can take going through all of four little villages. You can't find those kinds of beautifully engineered fast open roads with no reason to slow down anywhere in Europe, and I know because I drove all over the it on many different sportbikes as a kid.
With little effort the Z8 can be made to handle and go like a supreme high speed GT, exactly what it was meant to be, and it is an amazing platform from which to enjoy some of the most beautiful roads in the world. Chris is also dead wrong about the SL500 having better driving dynamics, I can say that because for the last five years I've had an SL500 as my daily driver. It's fine, but dead and boring as hell to take on a nice back road.
So why are the prices going up? Because it is an amazing and super fun car to drive on a beautiful day (we get about 300 of a year out here ;-) and a real practical classic, something all us original owners always knew it would become.
So, Chris, to see why you're wrong and really get an insight into the Z8 spend some time on our forum.
When we got the Z8, it was an emergency replacement to a F1 F355 Ferrari that was an absolute nightmare. That car let us down over 50% of the time that we attempted to send it out and midsummer we decided we had to pull the plug and swap the car out. For reasons that escape me, everyone loves a F355, so ours had bookings for next two months and we had to make the awkward call to each one of them to switch them out. We met greif on nearly every call with comments like "my wife drives a convertible BMW"... "I joined to drive that Ferrari"... etc., however, nearly every member shook my hand and thanked me when they brought the car back. It is among the top 5 cars we've ever owned out of 150+ over the past eight years.
I think there are a few factors that led you astray Chris... the first one, as you said, was that BMW brought everyone to a track to test a car that had no business being there. Honestly this is a problem with most car reviews these days... it's the most efficient way for the manufacturers to do a press event since they get 50 people in the car in one day and daytrips on everyday driving roads would take months to cover the same audience... However, 99% of the people that own a Z8 or any road car we're buying today will never take it to the track, so it's pointless. Don't get me wrong, I love tracks and am an avid racer, but the only thing I want to drive around a track is a track car and the very best road car will never be as fun around a track as even a dumpy old clapped out track car. Also, I'm sure your test car was equipped with run flat tires which are still questionable today, but were like driving with sack of bricks attached to the wheels 13 years ago. A set of non run-flat tires revolutionizes the car's road manners and while BMW's 'Performance Package' was really designed to fix the potential structural failures (likely caused by the rock hard runflats) there may be some rigidity improvements there as well.
All of that said, even having covered thousands of miles in our Z8 personally, I can't really give you much feedback on the at-the-limit handling characteristics of the car. It's just not a car I'd drive that hard and there aren't many public roads where you can safely push a car beyond it's limit of grip. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed a lot of spirited driving in the Z8 around local park roads, but have never found myself plowing through a corner with loads of understeer... maybe I've heard the tires sing through the corners a bit when I'm really clipping along, but man with that much tire, you'd have to be trying to cut it loose to have the car do anything, but go where you point it. Is the steering a little wallowy on center? maybe... and is the suspension a little soft? Arguably, but it's also has just the right amount compliance to barrel around a corner on a bit of uneven pavement and hold the road... Being that none of the roads we drive on are perfectly smooth, I can't tell you how many times I've been in stiffer cars with the wheels nearly leaving the ground at every crack in the pavement and thought I was going to lose it even at a modest pace.... Give me two more helpings of softness please... I like my tires on the road and a bit of forgiveness also gives you tasty feel for the cars handling dynamics before you hit the limit and snap. Take a look at the lotus super 7, one of the best handling cars in existence.... It's light enough that it can get away with being really soft, give loads of grip when you want it and cut loose in a perfectly predictable fashion when you toss it around. Rock hard springs ruin that in most cars.
Long story short, the Z8 is about the purest example of a modern classic in existence. A grunty V8, a big steering wheel, bit of an awkward seating position... it really is like a modern European version of a Shelby Cobra or a 60's Vette. It's also one of the few modern drop tops that feels like a real man's car and drives like one. Is it perfect and precise? No... but get yourself an M3 if that's the BMW flavor you're after... and there are countless experiences the Z8 will deliver that no precision sports car built on the Maximum G / 'Ringtime formula will ever give you.
The Z8 ? A great idea that wasn't completely sorted when it went on sale and was very expensive for BMW to produce. The concept car was so warmly received that BMW went with the flow in homage to the 507.
It came with an open differential like the Exige. Quaife make an LSD to replace that. Add some parts from the old five series and the handling is transformed, an inexpensive fix.
The original run flats were really, really heavy but quite new technology at the time. They messed up the car's ride quality and handling. There's better and lighter replacements, for example a 50lb weight saving by replacing wheels and tyres. Runflat tech has improved a lot since then though.
Understeer? A slightly wider tyre on the front could reduce that.
Constrictive rear boxes on the exhaust system that I think were really for the US market could be easily improved.
The aluminium frame issue seemed to be the result of heavy encounters on the road surface and affected very few cars. There was an anxiety about the new aluminium technology I think. A fix was available from BMW that could stiffen the front strut towers but replacing the heavy wheels and tyres may have been enough to solve the problem. It was all new tech at the time and a lot was learned from it.
Unique in many ways and a different sort of driving experience.
It came with an open differential like the Exige. Quaife make an LSD to replace that. Add some parts from the old five series and the handling is transformed, an inexpensive fix.
The original run flats were really, really heavy but quite new technology at the time. They messed up the car's ride quality and handling. There's better and lighter replacements, for example a 50lb weight saving by replacing wheels and tyres. Runflat tech has improved a lot since then though.
Understeer? A slightly wider tyre on the front could reduce that.
Constrictive rear boxes on the exhaust system that I think were really for the US market could be easily improved.
The aluminium frame issue seemed to be the result of heavy encounters on the road surface and affected very few cars. There was an anxiety about the new aluminium technology I think. A fix was available from BMW that could stiffen the front strut towers but replacing the heavy wheels and tyres may have been enough to solve the problem. It was all new tech at the time and a lot was learned from it.
Unique in many ways and a different sort of driving experience.
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