My daily driver is a BMW E92 325i SE — the N52B25 straight-six, manual, now well past 100k miles and still very much my favourite way to get around. It’s not the fastest thing on the road, and on paper a 2.5 six is fairly modest, but that almost misses the point: the engine is smooth and eager in a way that’s become rare, and paired with a proper manual gearbox it’s a genuinely satisfying car to drive. I’d take that feel over outright numbers any day. The coupe styling has aged well too, and after this many miles it’s started to feel less like just a car and more like something I’ve got a real relationship with.
A big part of that is doing the maintenance myself rather than handing it straight to a garage. I’ve worked through brakes, gaskets, the odd exhaust job and the usual running repairs that come with an older BMW, partly to keep the costs down but mostly because — like the homelab, the server and everything else here — I genuinely enjoy understanding how the thing works rather than just paying someone to make the problem disappear. There’s a real satisfaction in diagnosing something yourself and getting it sorted on your own driveway. It’s the kind of car that rewards being looked after, and somewhere down the line I’d like to add something a bit louder and more characterful alongside it as a weekend toy — the 325i has more than earned the right to stop being the one that does everything.