Is this the Future BMW 3 Series?

BMW’s best-selling car over its long-standing existence has been the 3 Series. There are a couple of easy-to-explain reasons for that seemingly unbreakable record, but it depends on whom you ask.

Go over to BMW’s HQ and you’ll soon learn that the 3 Series is so popular because of its dynamics and incredible driving performance. Ask anyone else in the industry and they’ll tell you that it’s because it used to be the cheapest car you could get with the blue and white roundel on the hood.

That was back in the day and today’s figures show that was actually the secret to its popularity. Now the 1 Series is the best-selling model in the range and guess why that is.

Leaving bitter feelings behind, the 3 Series has just received a facelift and that means it will still be in production for another 3 years or so. So in 2018 the new model will come out, and if we’re to believe the most recent print edition of Bild magazine, it should look something like the picture above.

Admittedly, they do say that the car has been “revealed” (enthüllt in German), but truth be told, this is just a rendering by a man named Radovan Varicack that probably has nothing to do with reality, no matter how hard they are trying to sell it.

Claiming that “this is how radical the changes on the new 3 Series will be” doesn’t help either, unless the new board of management gets really high and approves this in the final meeting before the designers stop working and engineers start. There’s no way BMW will go down this route.

Some hints are accurate, like the bigger kidney grilles and the new hood that won’t feature an ugly cut line right above the badge, but other than that, we can tell you that things will be a lot different.

 

 

Expect it to be another evolution of the current design language, focused more on the interior, where a drastic improvement is needed. On the outside, sleeker and wider headlights will dominate while the back end will go the same route.

Corona rings will be kept along, while the kidney grille is expected to grow in size but more likely in width, not height. Either way, we’re still a long way from learning what the car will actually look like and we’d better leave the designers do their thing so that we end up with a beautiful model on our hands. Until then, this kind of stuff remains just speculation.