Car of the Year Awards 2026: Performance Car of the Year
First and foremost, a great performance car is entertaining and involving to drive, but unlike pure sports cars, they also have to be practical and comfortable enough to use every day...
BMW M3 Touring Competition xDrive
If you want to explain the BMW M3 Touring, daredevil Evel Knievel probably put it best when he said: “I’m not a jack of all trades; I’m a master of many.” Indeed, while the M3 Touring doesn’t overly concern itself with things like efficiency, it excels at everything that’s important in a performance car. And on top of that, because it’s an estate, it’s more versatile than traditional saloon rivals.
Powered by a 523bhp twinturbocharged 3.0-litre engine (shared with the M3 Competition saloon), the M3 Touring is capable of sprinting from a standstill to 62mph in just 3.6sec – quicker than the (saloon-only) Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio and level pegging with the bigger, more powerful M5 Touring.
True, the Mercedes-AMG C63 Estate is slightly quicker still to 62mph, but that car’s powerful but dull-sounding four-cylinder hybrid engine is nowhere near as thrilling as the six-cylinder M3 Touring’s. It doesn’t matter where you are in the rev range; acceleration is savage and relentless in the M3, and there’s barely any interruption in the flow as the lightning-fast eight-speed automatic ’box shifts gears.
As impressive as the M3 Touring is in a straight line, twisty roads are most likely where you’ll enjoy it most, because it treads the line between capable and playful in an ideal way. When you want it to be as fast point to point as possible, the variable four-wheel drive system gives it seemingly endless traction and allows you to make full use of that power, while taut body control and sharp, ultraprecise steering mean the car will go exactly where you point it. It has such high limits that you’ll need to work your way up to them, but when you do, it’s more capable and rewarding than the M5 Touring, Giulia Quadrifoglio and C63 Estate.
If you want to have even more fun where it’s safe and legal to do so, the M3 Touring is happy to oblige. Just dive into its deeply customisable settings and you can vary almost everything, including the amount of power sent to the front and rear wheels and how big you want your drifts to be. And when you’re done with the fun, you can always nip to Ikea on the way home to pick up a bookcase or some other bulky cargo, because the M3 Touring doubles as a practical family car, thanks to a 500-litre boot and 40/20/40 split-folding rear seatbacks.
Doing the same Ikea run in a C63 Estate would be far more frustrating, because its boot is considerably smaller. In fact, the M3 Touring will be an easier car to live with generally. With its adaptive suspension, not only does it have a comfier ride, but its interior also feels higher in quality, its driving position is better and it has one of the best infotainment systems around.
Combine the M3 Touring’s practicality with the thrilling driving experience it offers and it’s hard to see why you’d settle for any of its rivals, or pay more for the bigger M5 Touring.
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