Article Summary
- The car has wind-up windows, yet its center console carries the switches for electric windows.
- BMW didn’t sell a five-door hatchback until the E87 1 Series debuted at the Paris Motor Show in September 2004.
- BMW Classic also keeps the one-off 1996 M3 Compact, rated at 316 hp (236 kW) and never approved for production.
BMW built almost 400,000 E36 3 Series Compacts between 1994 and 2000, and every one left the factory with two side doors and a tailgate. BMW Classic has now shown the exception: a five-door BMW 316i Compact, a one-off that had never been seen in public before. Nothing about this car points to a performance experiment. It’s a 316i, the entry-level gasoline model in the Compact lineup, and it started life in Boston Green with a cloth interior, an automatic gearbox, and heated seats. That’s the spec of a commuter or a family runabout, which is roughly the buyer a five-door body would have been chasing. At some point the car was repainted red, the color it wears today.
The windows are the oddest part. The car has wind-up windows, yet the center console carries the switches for electric windows. It’s not a combination BMW would have put in a brochure, and it suggests a car assembled by hand from the parts bin rather than one finished to production spec.
BMW presented the Compact at the end of 1993 and put it in showrooms in April 1994, as a 3 Series hatchback about 23 cm (9 inches) shorter than the sedan. BMW Group Classic says it was aimed at the Golf class, at younger buyers or families shopping for a second car, and priced as the brand’s new entry point. To hit that price, BMW reused plenty of E30 hardware, including the older car’s semi-trailing-arm rear suspension and parts of its interior. In the UK, a 316i Compact cost £13,650 in 1995, about £2,000 less than the previous cheapest way into a BMW. American buyers only got it as the 318ti.
Our guess is that the price is what kept this car a one-off. Two extra doors mean new door tooling and more cost on a model whose job was to be the cheapest BMW, and a five-door hatchback would have crowded the 3 Series sedan and Touring that already covered family buyers.
BMW didn’t sell a five-door hatchback until the E87 1 Series, which debuted at the Paris Motor Show in September 2004. The E46 Compact that arrived in 2000 stayed with three doors, and when the 1 Series finally came, BMW launched the five-door first and added a three-door in 2007.
BMW Classic Now Holds Two One-Off E36 Compacts
The five-door isn’t the only Compact BMW kept for itself. In 1996, BMW M built an M3 Compact with the S50B32 3.2-liter inline-six from the European M3, rated at 316 hp (236 kW). It weighed 150 kg (331 pounds) less than the M3 Coupe, and BMW even lent it to magazines such as Auto Motor und Sport to test, yet the board never approved it. It now lives in BMW Group Classic’s collection in Munich.
The two cars stretch the Compact in opposite directions, one with far more power than the chassis was designed for and the other with more doors than the price allowed. The M3 Compact has been filmed and written about for years, while the five-door 316i stayed out of sight until now. Of the two, it’s the one we’d have bet against existing.
