Terry should buy it!

Yeah- it's definitely a worthy successor to his e46.

Absolutely! His new spine will thank him for it.

automatic and awd you might as well get a X3 but I guess that is just me.

Tippy tippy tippy. I don't like the X3 at all.

Ha. Didn't find the x3 particularly tippy in normal driving - the main reason i'd get this over an x3 is that it looks much cooler.

I much prefer wagons. And I have 150 lbs-worth of dogs to haul around (one dog is getting up there in years)--that is much easier done in a wagon.

I also agree the wagon is much cooler looking. This one of the best looking wagons BMW has done in recent years.

While the THP is not perfect, I can't imagine owning an f30 without it. It's the new ZSP. There is no OEM passive suspension option for xdrives in any case. This all started with the adaptive suspension option on the 335i xdrive that Sarafil noted some years ago, and the THP pretty much tweaks/continues that while adding brakes. I wish it didn't mean loss of fog lights.

Another thing I'd watch on an f30 are the headlights. I'm unhappy with the base LED headlights' illumination. The adaptive option is supposed to help, but I'm not sure if it will be enough. Any bixenon 3er or 5er had better illumination. Even the halogen ones, you could ameliorate with 65W bulbs or HID swaps. There is nothing you can do to the 340i base headlight and it's my biggest complaint on the car.

The X3 is definitely dramatically worse to drive than the F30. Both are pretty bad.

[Answering various posts]

Mine may or may not have been the most expensive E46 wagon, but was told by BMWNA that it was the highest-optioned one they ever sold in the US, and that was before I added all of the unobtainium options (the Individual wood, power folding mirrors, lumbar support, TV that only gets analog channels, yadda-yadda). In fact, when I was talking to Tom Purves once, he said "Oh, you're the person with that one" :lol:

I still have that car and don't have any plans to get rid of it, just keep feeding it front CV joints as a regular diet. :rolleyes: I also don't like the newer wagon designs where the roof drops down toward the rear. The whole point of a wagon is to have lots of room in the back, particularly right at the hatch.

The older BMWs were a lot more user-modifiable - you could take control of the management bus and do things. That's the way the Phatbox works (although it pretends to be a CD changer), but I've also added the Stealth One (integrates the V1 with the nav display) and a gizmo of my own design that reads the rain sensor and if the car was left parked with any window or sunroof open and it starts to rain, it will chirp the alarm once (to let anyone with their arm on the window know things are about to happen), then raise the windows(s) and chirp and cycle that window continuously (well, 10 tries, don't want to burn out the window regulator) if the window pinch sensor detects an obstruction while raising the window. Let's see, what else? The side view mirrors will power fold in if the valet key was in the ignition and the car was turned off. There's a USB port in the trunk which will register on the PC as a compound device called "Terry's BMW" and I have a Windows app (probably need to rebuild it for Windows 7/10 - I haven't used it in a while) that lets me do pretty much all dealer coding functions.

The only thing I miss is BMW's / aftermarket's failure to produce updated navigation DVDs. Since the CarinDB format has been cracked, I could probably take any current Teleatlas map and convert it, but it hasn't been annoying enough (yet) to deal with it.