I understand the concept of “its how you drive the car”, which is why I was able to average just a hair shy of 30mpg with my ’04 Corvette Z06 on a trip from DFW to Denver and back. At the same point in time, I don’t see a roadster’s MPG being the biggest selling point. By design, they’re small, nimble, fairly lightweight vehicles with (mostly) 6 speeds and fairly torquey engines. Fuel mileage is going to be decent enough by design unless someone absolutely screws things up.

For a roadster, the first and foremost trait should be performance. How does it handle? Is it easy to pass on the highway? Is it fun to throw around in the twisties? Are the brakes responsive? You’ll notice I didn’t mention anything about penny-pinching fuel economy…

It’s a BMW roadster, not a cheap econo-car meant for college students on a tight budget.

The Prius is only as economical as you drive it.

Top Gear did an experiment with a E90 M3 vs the Prius in a fuel economey challenge. Both were driven at same speeds, but the M3 beat the Prius by 2 MPG. The reason was the Prius would drive as fast around the TG track as it could, while the M3 had to closely follow it.

While the comparison was a bit biased towards the M3, it proves a great point, which is “It’s not the car you drive, but how you drive it”.

There’s NO WAY I would buy that car with a 4 cylinder. I don’t care if you slap a turbo and 87 ///M badges, I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.

BMW can’t get it’s 4-cylinder engines back to the USA soon enough.

A car this size ought to be a 35 mpg car.

I just can’t bring myself to do it, though. The car just looks too damn good, even for my sarcastic, cynical self.

@Bmwe34: the antenna is pretty standard on BMW roadsters and coupes. You can actually buy a much smaller, truncated antenna that works just as well.

I’ve heard that production was moved back to Germany because of the complicated folding top….that BMW wanted the car built close to the suppliers, etc so that if a production difficulty popped up it could be modified virtually in-house. Don’t know if it’s true or not….but for US customers there is a hitch- if you are ordering a car built to spec, you’ll have apprx. 2 addl. weeks added to your wait time for trans-Atlantic delivery.