By the end of the 70s BMW had renumbered to their now iconic schema: the New class was forked into the 3-series and 5-series, the New six forked into the 6-series and 7-series. Starting with the E21 3-series compact coupes and sedans, the E12 5-series mid-sized sedan, the E24 6-series coupe, and the E23 7-series full sized sedan. The BMW brand began to grow.

Things changed over times. Everything grew. The 6-series was once a 7-series coupe, but when it was reintroduced in 2004, it was a 5-series coupe. BMW released a few sports cars, the M1 at the end of the 70s, the Z1 at the end of the 80s, the 8-series (a 7-series coupe again) in the 90s, the Z3 at the end of the 90s, and the Z4 in the early 2000s. BMW remained true to its target market the entire time, the best handling and thusly most enjoyable drives in their markets. The 3-series sedan and coupe was always BMWs bread and butter, the popularity and sales of BMW was at an all time high.

The BMW brand is one of the most valuable brands in the world, automotive or otherwise, so you can’t blame BMW for wanting to expand their brand. It began in the early 2000s with the X5, the least sporty car BMW had ever built. It sold gangbusters. Go forward 10 years and BMW sells an X1, an X3, an X5 and an X6 and a 5-series GT (yet another crossover thing) all cars panned by BMW’s original driver centric market. The X6 is a “sports coupe” that weighs as much as a small bus with a center of gravity to match, they even make an M model (remember when the M badge represented a car built, even just engineered by BMW M and not just shit bolted on?), what a joke… As of 2011 BMW now sells 11 distinct lines in our market…

Things looked good when BMW released the 1-series coupe in the North American market. A smaller (though not nearly light enough) sportier car at a lower price point, and as of 2011 BMW even has a 1-series M coupe. Perhaps there is hope after all? Perhaps not. Seems BMW wants to redefine the 1-series brand already. They intend to fork the 1-series coupe we know as the 2-series (more on that later) by 2013, and relaunch the 1-series as a front-wheel drive car (i.e. a stretched Mini platform) to be better aligned with the Audi A3. Thats right BMW is going to sell a front wheel drive car under the BMW brand. Why? Because the BMW brand is worth its weight in platinum, and a BMW badged Mini will sell better and for a higher price than a Mini badged one.

Next up is BMW’s decision to rebrand the 3-series coupe as the 4-series… That’s right, the car known as the 3-series coupe since 1975 will now be called the 4-series. Why? Not entirely sure. The 3-series coupe has always demanded a premium price over the sedan, and maybe BMW wants to give warm fuzzies to the brainless luxury target market they so love for spending an extra $10k to lose 2 doors and gain a better suspension… This action will ruin any residuals on existing 3-series coupes, confuse customers and obliterates 35+ years of heritage.

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper, more reliable Lexus of the 90s? They were fun to drive. Why are so many 3, 5, 7 and all the X cars 4WD now?

BMW? Do you remember what made your cars better than the cheaper and faster Infiniti’s of the 2000s? They were more fun to drive. Why are you releasing a FWD 1-series and telling my the X6 is the evolution of the sports car?

Here’s the thing BMW, you are losing what made your brand awesome. I know things are doing great now, BMWs are selling better than ever. I can’t blame a company trying to obtain more money, that is their obligation to their shareholders. The problem is, the further you get away from what made you awesome, the closer you get to the competition. Look at cars up until the 200s, Audi made the most utterly boring cars on the planet, but have you seen the new S5? Gorgeous! Merc made slushy luxury cars, but look at the current C-class, and of course C63 AMG and SLS AMG, I mean come on! Fantastic cars. Look at Lexus, king of the sofas on wheels, they even have an M3 fighter in the IS-F… Infiniti is slowly eating out the bottom of the 3/C/A4 segment too, offering near 335i performance at 128i prices.

The further BMW gets away from its roots, the closer the competition seems to get to BMWs roots. The brand won’t stay strong on its own forever. This current obsession with 10+ distinct product lines has been tried before, look at what happened to all the American brands… Amusingly of all of the current 11 product lines, there isn’t a single car I like as much as the BMW I have and the one I had before that… Sure you can blame the fuel economy movement for the boring-up of the new M5 and M6 and surely the next M3s… How long before a 4WD M5 or even M3… Might as well buy an RS5 at that point, it certainly looks better!

Enough with the rant, I’ll leave you this video of Chris Harris slinging the new 1-series M and the Cayman R around.  Enjoy!

Quite a mean stance!

vs the original BMW M exhaust

So the weekend before last, Tom and I set up to install a free-flowing exhaust on the M Coupe. I was pretty picky with what I wanted from an exhaust, the stock BMW M units are pretty good, albeit very quiet and thus quite heavy. I didn’t want a boomy american (or ‘rice’) sound just to shed some weight and add a bit of top end power, so I ended up getting bespoke exhaust makers Hayward & Scott of Essex (UK) to build me one. After a month of pounding on metal in sheds, the men from Essex sent me a hand-made exhaust. We waited for good enough weather to perform the install and got to work…

Flying M-Coupe

The process is easy enough in theory. In fact our biggest worry, seized bolts/joints was a non issue. The real challenge was fitting hands/tools in places to remove joints. We put the car up on four jacks, as high as we pretty much could. One of our jacks was low on hydraulic fluid, and was located at the back on the driver side, so we shuffled it to the front passenger side where it would be less of a determent. After playing with the jacks for awhile we were ready to begin. We began by removing the BMW back boxes. Each one was held on to two brackets, rubber mounts. Getting them off of the brackets was much harder than just removing the brackets from the body, so thats what we ended up doing. Each muffler was connected to the mid-section with two bolts and a metal ring, easy enough to remove. Removing the BMW mufflers, you really got a feel for how heavy they were, in excess of 30 pounds a pop.

Car parts scattered across the lawn like hillbillies

With those removed we could focus on removing the mid-section. The mid-section is guarded by several heat shields, which also keep it snug with the chassis. Removing those was trivial. The mid-section is attached to the rear cats (the car has four catalytic converters in the North American spec) with six bolts. Removing the top bolts proved to be exceedingly difficult but we managed to do so. At this point we felt pretty pleased with our efforts. We began to try and jiggle and slide the mid-section out from under the car to no avail. It was being blocked by two large pieces of the rear subframe that cross the back of the car and add to the overall rigidity. After hesitating and trying to partially undo and move them out of the way, we gave up and removed both cross bars. This made removing the mid-section a snap, and we put it on the lawn with all of our other parts.

The H&S mid pipes look pretty

The stock BMW M mid-section is an X-pipe and contain a mid resonator, and was also quite a heavy part. The Hayward & Scott mid pipes we were replacing them with were a straight stainless steel X-pipe. This change reduces back pressure, reduces overall weight (although not by more than 10 pounds) and produces an awesome crackley overrun noise on lift off and during engine braking… After a short break, we installed the mid pipe, having similar trouble getting those top bolts in. After putting those in, we reattached the cross bars, and then put the heat shields back up. From there we were able to begin installing the H&S back boxes. We rotated and snug them onto the mid pipes until they lined up with the brackets. This wasn’t particularly hard, though the mid-section was not perfectly symmetrical (an issue with any non robot made parts), and thusly made fitment on the drivers side a bit trickier than the other.

The heat shielding in the exhaust housings is impressive

We finished up, put the drivers side wheel, and lowered the car. I then proceeded to fire her up. The sound of a cold start was pretty impressive, you could FEEL it. Pretty soon the car warmed up and it became silent as it hummed a long in neutral. I took her out for a quick spin. Low revs are a bit deeper than I had anticipated, but the scream at high revs is just spine-tingling. Better yet is the sound between gear shifts, as unspent fuel burns up on the pipes and crackles out the back. This becomes more pronounced as the pipes heat up, to the point where a throttle blip with a fully hot exhaust is just incredible. Highway cruising is completely silent thankfully, however any throttle under full transmission load is quite a bit louder than I had anticipated. Superficial (though important, since you have to live with it) criteria aside, performance is fantastic. Though its really hard to say as the car has always had a ton of power put down to the road, so detecting a predictably small peak power improvement is impossible, we’ll have to book some dyno time to really know for sure.

The weekend after we did a bit more fitment work on the drivers side, as the pipe still sits crooked, more so when the exhaust heats up and expands. We’ve not quite gotten it perfect. I’m also not 100% happy with the volume level, it’s a bit TOO loud for my taste, though it sounds fantastic and raw, not synthetic and big-tippy. Never the less it’s been a fun project, however it turns out! Thanks to Tom for his hours upon hours of work.

The following is a video I made with a cold exhaust, the overrun is not nearly as noticeable as hot pipes, sadly. I had made a better one earlier but had completely forgotten to TURN THE MICROPHONE ON (as was the fate of my ‘before’ video). I might make another one one day, but I generally don’t like sitting and revving the engine like a child in place, its rather anti-social :)

However in the late years of the e36 as BMW began to really become popular, BMW North America’s 2/3-model strategy and it’s belief in utter customer stupidity caused it to muddy the waters. Feeling that things like a 25i and 28i would be too close for customers to see the value-add, so they padded the numbers around. In Europe, where they sold many more different models of say the e90 (320, 323, 325, 328, 330, 335!) it wasn’t quite as bad. Unfortunately with the wide-spread adoption of turbos, BMW has pretty much just said screw it and assigned numbers willynilly based on focus groups to influence market perception. This new 2.0L turbo will surely show up in a US spec 328i in the future. Nothing wrong with the engine, produces as much power as the outgoing US-spec 3.0L 6-cyl badged 328i we get, but call it a 320i and be done with it. (Or heck bring back the 2002 era TURBO badging to make people feel special!) How stupid could the luxury car buyers really be… oh wait don’t answer that…

Let’s take a look at the 3-ers:

These all represent Canadian models as the US has often lacked the base (323i, 320i) that we got because their prices are generally much much lower (you can buy a 328i for 323i money here, even with conversion, cost of living, etc factored in. thanks BMW).

Remember too, dear BMW will sell you a 740i in the US with the same engine as the 2007 335i, with the power output claim to be the realistic 321HP output that engine made, instead of the understated 300HP they claimed. 735i would have seemed too pedestrian for 7-series buyers right? I’ll do another chart on a future lazy morning about how BMW basically completely forked US/CA and European engines the way they were in the 80s, though this time it’s because of our shitty quality gas instead of our stricter emission requirements. (Hint: they all went direct injection, got way more power and way better fuel economy, but aside from the turbos, have yet to see our market some 4 years later)

Some new BMW marketing thats actually pretty awesome. Check out the loader animation on the official campaign site too, pure awesome. Considering how undesirable I find all their current (aside from the facelifted e90/e92 3-series) cars, I’m glad to see them at least acknowledging their past greatness.

I am woefully behind in blog posts, I’ll try and get to it after I break the back of some heavy projects at work today…

Now, how about some weather good enough to get the car up and work under it…

Gorgeous weather!

Gettin' my Myspace on: the cell-phone-in-a-bathroom-mirror-style self-portrait

One of the hardest things to capture when it comes to cars is the sound of the engine. Engine sound is made up of several components, but the majority of the sound is induction and exhaust. Induction is the howl produced when the cylinders suck air in, exhaust is when they push post-explosion hot air out. Capturing induction isn’t particularly difficult, the frequencies seem to pick up pretty well on everything from cell phones and better. Exhaust is a much trickier thing to capture accurately, though being the louder sound on most cars, is what people desire to record.

The reason exhaust is so hard to capture accurately is two fold. Firstly the frequencies are quite low, which poses a problem for most smaller mic pickups. To that end, I don’t believe its ever *really* possible to capture and play back an accurate exhaust of say a Ferrari or a Le Mans car, but we wan’t to get as close as possible… As much of the sound is ‘felt’ as it is heard.

Boom!

Secondly, and the major problem when recording exhaust notes is the shear amount of sound. A showroom stock high performance car will produce upwards of 80 dB at full throttle at a distance of about 15 meters (50 ft). Thats not particularly a problem for most microphones, but the sound levels go up dramatically as you get closer making it impossible to get any sort of accurate recording. Race cars on the other hand, such as ALMS cars produce 110dB as close as 15 m. Good luck trying to capture it from a far, let alone from right at the apex of a turn. Once a microphone is over exposed, it begins to clip, and not all frequencies are lost evenly. This produces very unrealistic audio, and is the reason that most of the exhaust videos on the youtube are terrible… Anyone who’s tried to record race cars will attest to this.

The 5Dmk2 revolutionized the world of HD video recording, with its full frame sensor’s amazing low light performance. As good as its video quality is, its audio quality isn’t. The tiny onboard mono mic clips early, produces very non linear tones and always ends up sounding echoy. I’ve never been happy with the sound on the videos I’ve produced of our own cars, and at the track its completely useless. Upon doing some research into the budding SLR microphone market, I decided to pick up a RODE Videomic on Tuesday. The mic provides recording down to 40hz (with an optional high pass filter to cut it off at 80hz, though thats the opposite of what I need), and can record 143dB with less than 1% distortion. On top of that, theres dips for -10 and -20db pads. More than enough for the race track. The mic is light and snaps directly into the hot shoe mount, plugging into the mic port on the left of the body.

I gave the setup a test run, which more than vetted the recording resolution of the mic. However I had set gain up wrong on the camera body, which didn’t really show it off. I whistled in the parking garage and watched the dB meter, deciding upon an audio gain of 3/64. This was much too low while blipping the throttle to about 4500 rpm, with the sport button off, that both slows down the opening and prohibits the throttle bodies from opening fully at low RPMs.  (I’ve since learned humans can whistle in excess of 120dB!) I doubled the audio in iMovie ’09, and it was still too quiet. Though despite being boosted by 200%, the reproduction quality was still good, you can hear the muted throaty-ness of the exhaust, and the wurr of the inline-6 feeding it, pretty accurately to being behind the car. Next time I’ll probably go with a gain setup on the camera body of 15/64, keeping the HPF off and not using any of the on-mic pads.  Fun ahead!

Enter RPI. A small shop out in Irvine California that does serious R&D on BMW, Porsche, Aston Martin and amusingly Nobles. Frankly I respect any small shop doing real engineering, and RPI definitely does just that.

Armed with a socket wrench, pliers, elongated screw driver and iPad, I installed their skid plates and ram air scoop on Sunday.

Skid plates were something I probably should have acquired long ago. They bolt directly onto the front ‘fangs’ and protect the car’s inferior 4″ of ground clearance from whacking on drive ways. It frankly took me half a year to reliably back out of my parents driveway without whacking the nose at the bottom of their driveway, even very slowly. Thankfully these impacts caused only minor scuffs to the bottom of the fangs. The plates are nicely powder coated black aluminium. Installing the plates was trivial: simply removing the hardware already holding the fangs up, lining the plates up, and screwing it back in. They sit fairly flush and provide an aluminium barrier against potentially worse impacts. This exercise added a modest 186.5 grams to either side of the front nose, not particularly bad.

Before we talk about the scoop, I want to take an aside to talk about induction modification. I had done a full on air box swap on my 325i. It was an AFE unit, cheap but enjoyable. While it did provide major improvements to the mid-range power, it seemed to loss power at low speeds and in hot weather (i.e. traffic). A bit of tinfoil and furnace tape improved things. The unit was definitely generic, sorta cut to fit the 325i’s M54B25. The gains on the box, website, etc were all for an unrelated car. Either way it actually did improve around town performance, fuel economy and produced a howl that was nothing other than frightening.

Onto the M Coupe. Being a purpose built high-performance car, the air box is actually quite good. Never the less the usual group of suspects have trotted out a part that will fit, many (including AFE) appear to *lose* power though. In fact, aside from the Gruppe-M unit (absurdly priced at $1100 for a carbon fiber tube), they all seem to be nothing more than noise makers. Having said that, there seem to be gains to be had from changing out the stock intake stack to a ram air scoop. RPI claims 8HP at 100 km/hr, repeated dyno runs, hood closed (with a fan @ 60mph). As with all performance modifications, gains claimed by the manufacturer should be taken with a grain of salt. Thankfully enough trust-worthy people seem to back these claims up, and 3rd party dyno results have agreed.

The obvious question many people ask is, why would a small aluminum scoop add power that BMW didn’t seem fit to obtain? This looks to be a case of trade-offs vs performance. The stock stack is turned up, only getting the air that rises to the top of nose section of the car (more on this later), while the new scoop faces outward. The big trade off here is filter wear and filter cleaning. The air box filter needs to be cleaned far more often, and replaced more often. To an enthusiast willing to do work on his own car, this isn’t really so much of a problem.

Removing the stock cup was pretty trivial, a few clips to be removed (one of which needed the pliers), then the unit was slid out. Thankfully, unlike the e46 3-series, the e86 M coupe has a lot of hood. This means that the engine is further back in the chassis, and also there is a lot more room to move your hands around. The biggest difference, even between the e86 (Z4) and e36 (Z3) M is the nose section. The nose on the e86 is ‘lengthy’ and completely separated from the engine bay. It contains the extra oil cooling and chassis bracing the M demands. Also it gives a good few extra inches that can be used for the ram air scoop. Installing the scoop required positioning it to feed the air box, and then screwing in 3 self tapping screws. Lining the scoop up took a bit of fiddling, but in the end it fit perfectly.


A fun hour of work. I have to say I’m very impressed with the air ducting of the e86. The air box is fed very directly from the kidney grill, more so now with the scoop. I certainly don’t think I’ll ever replace the air box, and even the OE filters are very impressive. The stock intake stack weighed 49.5 grams, the RPI ram air scoop weighs 101.5 grams, a weight gain of 52 grams, again, not bad. We’ll see some major weight loss in a month or so to offset the 425 grams added.

BONUS: I hooked the HD Hero up to the bumper, this time with a sufficiently fast SD card in it, worked like a charm:

Bumper cam was a success, should be a blast when the weather improves. 3.5 degree C start, warm up, then the drive to where I did the work above. It does vibrate against the car a bit which makes some unpleasant noise, I’ll rectify that by adding some foam tape to the back of the camera. Watch it on Youtube for full 720p-goodness.

BTW, I’ve happily moved to using my images to mlkshk, you should too!

Hilarious :D

First up we have an e30 M3 (’86-92) with the S85 (5.0L v10) going up against an e90 M3 (’08-now)…

The e30 + Corvette engine swaps have nothing on that epic v10…

Next up we have an e63 M6 (’05-’10) natively with that S85 v10 going up against an e34 M5 (’88-’95) turbo’d to apparently 1000HP

And finally the e30 M3 with the V10 against the turbo “1000HP” M5…

Fantastic stuff.

The other cool factoid of note is that the car is equipped with the FTM (Flat Tire Monitor) as opposed to the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitor). US cars all got TPMS in 2007+, though the guys at the garage told me some Canadian and European models kept the FTM. The FTM works by tracking wheel rotation and can detect if a tire is spinning too fast. It has to be calibrated after changing tire/wheel size or extreme temperature change, but at least it doesn’t have the breakable/losable wireless stem monitors.

The e86 chassis is so stiff, with the rear tire barely off the ground, the front tire freely spins around :)

First off, I migrated my personal email over to Google’s hosted domain service. This is something I had wanted to do for a long time, but laziness had prevented the migration. To be fair I had been forwarding my email through Google for their superior spam filtering prowess for years anyway. The interface for creating and maintaining services in Google Apps is, as expected, very polished. I was mostly impressed with the way Google handles distribution lists, which they call groups. A lot more powerful than our old vpopmail alias. And as anyone who has ever used Google’s hosted mail will tell you, they have seven MX servers, a touch more reliable than my single qmail install on an ancient webserver. Plus admining mailservers is rubbish work! Just ask anyone who has had the misfortune of doing it professionally…

So one of the things I’ve enjoyed for years is vanity searching, ego searching, whatever you want to call Googling (previously Altavista’ing and previously Yahoo’ing) my own name. Sarah, Tom and I also have a bit of search result rivalry. I generally win the top search result for Kavassalis (though this differs depending on search location). This is mostly due to the fact that Google likes me hoarding and cross linking all the Kavassalis.* domains. It also loves me due to some links from blogs and stuff like flickr and other social networking junk. Amusingly though, Sarah is the top search suggestion, followed by Tom, followed by a conspiracy nut who’s name is unfortunately often dislexic-ally misspelled as Kavassalis. This by my logic means that Sarah’s site should come up first, since thats most likely what someone will be looking for. So obviously Google’s metric is not quite perfect. I am pleased however that (in .ca) kavas is enough to get kavassalis as a suggestion. Ah the joys of having a last name that really does just belong to members of your own family…

Now onto the buzziest Google product of late, the Android. I really don’t like the Android. Well maybe thats a bit harsh. I am disappointed with Android. Let me start by explaining why before the cult of (XYZ phone/operating system/game console) groupies flood my inbox with emails telling me how stupid I am. Lets segway to video games for a second. Console gaming and PC gaming have always had a vast gap in overall experience in a post DOS/Amiga world. Simply put, console games just work. There is no weird artifacting because you a strange video card, there is no slow down because you don’t have the newest CPU, and there are no random crashes because it doesn’t like some random driver. Common hardware, common resolutions == better development and user experience.

Back to phones though, Android’s spec should have included classifications on CPU, GPU power and screen size. Maybe call those early 320 x 480 528mhz devices Android Class1, and these 600 x 854 600mhz devices Android Class2. Device capability fragmentation is going to make the overall Android experience limited, and certainly will not allow it to become a casual gaming and consumer software consumption platform the way the iPhone has. Some phones like the Motorola Droid are absolutely phenomenal. But even if you follow the proper non pixel based UI procedures, you may produce apps that are unreadable or too slow on something like a lesser HTC Dream. (I mean the res gap on some Android phones is the same 2x factor between most netbooks and some higher-end 15″ laptops) For tech savvy users this won’t be a problem, we’ll understand why something isn’t working well or looking right, but we aren’t the bulk of consumers, we don’t push a platform to prominence. Remember, where there are consumers there will be good software. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Android has bad software, Google’s first party apps are fantastic in fact, but I’m not going to see the plethora of high quality third party software without a big user base willing to buy software. Android will become the #1 phone platform, without a doubt, but if users don’t feel confident that software they buy will work right, they aren’t going to bring the dollars. Open source projects will always be more prominent on the Android platform than others due to the nature of how the Android project is maintained, but before I am flooded with hate mail from the Slashdot crowd, the majority of open source mobile/desktop apps are just not up to UI snuff with their commercial counter parts. Fact. (GIMP sucks, ok?)

I’m very interested in seeing how (if) Apple will tackle this problem, and I think it may end up causing some heartache in iPhone land. Already there is a good memory and small CPU bump between the 3G and 3GS, while developers can detect and profile their code for each phone, most don’t. And frankly doing so is a great deal of added work, plus users really aren’t going to like a heavily degraded experience either. This means that on most cutting edge apps, there will be tons of bad reviews from 3G and a plethora of iPod touch owners complaining of lag and stutter. Fast forward to the next gen iPhone. I full well assume Apple is going to up the game and release a phone with the same chip as in the iPad, the 1ghz ARM7, Apple a4 or whatever it’s called. I believe they will have institute requirements/recommended flags in the Appstore, which sucks, but frankly leaving it completely up to developers isn’t really going to be a very good user experience either. This problem is 10-fold more difficult on the Android since there are TONS of third party phones. I’m not sure there really is a good solution. The phone market unfortunately won’t be happy with the same CPU/GPU/screen size in a device for 5-10 years like handheld gaming markets…

Really I’m not slagging the Android that much, there are great Android phones, and I’d certainly love a Motorola Droid as a dev platform, ssh client, email platform if it weren’t CDMA… The experience will be frankly no issue for savvy users, but I’d not buy my mom an Android, but I do plan on buying her an iPhone.

I guess thats all I have to say about Google and Google products for one day. I’ll close by saying my car shopping is weighing on my mind. However a new and stand-out choice in the world of very fast, 50/50 weight distributed, RWD sports vehicles has arisen. 2007 550i are only slightly more expensive than 2007 335Ci due to the magic of disproportional depreciation, packing in more power and WAY more tech and luxury. I’d definitely be happy with a 550i, nothing says eco and gas friendly like a big v8… nothing quite sounds like it either!

(Included photo is IEOY winners, illustrating they’re all either small and economical or wonderful BMW engines :P)