BMW 320d xDrive: no more excuses not to buy a 3 Series

Who cares if a car damages the environment? Real people only want to know if it’s value for money.

One look at a 320d and you wonder why anybody would buy an Audi instead.

I have been amused in recent weeks by various earnest news reporters telling us that people these days decide which car to buy on the basis of how much damage it will do to the environment.

Of course, this is entirely true inside the BBC, which is why many of the staff go to work on foldaway bicycles. But in the actual world, where women shave their armpits and see Jeremy Corbyn as a humorous throwback, people couldn’t give a stuff about emissions or any of that PC nonsense. You could use slaves to build a car that ran on a mix of cyanide and potassium, but if it had free mud flaps and a five-year warranty you’d sell it by the shipload.

Value for money matters. Fuel economy matters too, along with comfort, zest and reliability. What comes out of the poo chute is irrelevant. And so too, weirdly, is styling.

It’s odd. Nobody would choose to have ugly children and nobody would deliberately fill their house with furniture that they found displeasing to the eye. Yet every year thousands and thousands of people buy a car that has the aesthetic appeal of a gaping wound.

I don’t think there has been a time in automotive history when the market has been so awash with ugly cars.

A few manufacturers are swimming against the ugly tide. Kia is one. BMW is another. Of course, the German giant can sell you an X3 that is terrible, but its saloons and coupes are magnificent.

The 5 Series in particular is a masterpiece. And the 3 Series I was using last week is not far behind. You look at it and you think: “Why on earth would someone choose to buy an Audi or a Mercedes or a Lexus instead?”

One of the reasons, of course, is that in winter BMWs are famously hopeless. In fact the main reason the country grinds to a halt every time there’s a light dusting of snow or a mild frost is that every road in the land is blocked by a BMW, its big fat rear wheels spinning uselessly and its panicking driver filling in insurance forms, knowing that although the accident hasn’t happened yet, it will.

Well, with the BMW I’ve been driving, those days are gone because it has four-wheel drive. Such a car has been available on the continent for almost a decade, but until recently BMW’s designers never really saw the point of engineering all-wheel drive into right-hand-drive models. They probably thought that in Britain, where the weather is rarely very bad, we could cope. Yeah, right.

We are told this northern winter will be bad and doubtless, if it is, the BBC will blame Volkswagen. But in your sparkly new 320d with xDrive you’ll be fine.

There are some downsides. First of all, there’s a premium to pay. That’s reasonable. There are a lot of extra cogs and stuff. There’s more. The space between the centre console and the wheel arch is quite tight, which means every time you want to go faster, you hit the brake and come to a halt. More important, the fuel consumption is hit hard. And it’s slower. I suppose, in case someone from the BBC is reading this — highly unlikely, I know — I should also mention it produces 10 more carbon dioxides.

So, there’s a heavy price to pay for the ability to get out of your drive on that icy morning. And in all probability you won’t be going anywhere anyway because your neighbour will have slithered into a lamppost in his two-wheel-drive 3 Series and blocked the road.

Really, then, it’s up to you whether you choose xDrive or not. Only you know whether you need it enough to make the penalties worthwhile. Either way, you do get a lovely car. Wheel-arch intrusion aside, the driving position is sublime and the thickness and texture of the steering wheel are perfect.

In the early days, BMW’s iDrive command and control system was a jumble of unintelligible submenus and nonsense, but today it’s the standard-bearer of common sense and logic, twin features that you find throughout the car. Rear seat space, the size of the boot, the way everything operates and the ride: it’s as if you’d designed it yourself.

Naturally, I do have a couple of niggles. The steering — electric these days, rather than hydraulic — doesn’t have the fluidity that used to be a hallmark of BMW. And the parking sensors are stupidly pessimistic. “You’re going to crash! You’re going to crash!!!!” they wail hysterically when you are still metres from the car behind.

Oh, and then there’s the diesel engine. Two years ago eco-loonies were telling everyone diesel was the fuel to use. Then one day they decided that, no, diesel was not the fuel to use. Because it will cause global warming that will cool the planet. Or something.

It’s hard to be sure with these nutters who say they can predict what the weather will be in a thousand years even though the Met Office’s giant computers can’t even work out what it will be doing tomorrow. So I shall ignore them and tell you that BMW’s diesel engine is fine. It sounds rather good, it has immense torque and it settles down to a muted hum on the motorway.

Plus you’ll get better mileage than you would be with a petrol-powered alternative. Which, as we established at the beginning, matters a great deal more than how many nitrogens are being left in your wake.

BMW 320d xDrive SE: 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol

Outputs: 135kW at 4000rpm and 380Nm at 1750rpm

Transmission: Six-speed manual, all-wheel drive

Average fuel consumption: 6.8 litres per 100km

Price: £31,285 ($67,400, this model N/A Australia)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Verdict: Four wheels good