BMW 328i

 

Almost every country has a unique detail that sets it apart from anywhere else. In France, for instance, you can’t walk for more than 100 yards without treading on a dog turd. Australia has too many dangerous animals. Germany has too much armpit hair. India needs a spring clean. And then we get to Sweden, where I spent a recent weekend. The little detail here is odd: there aren’t enough chairs. I stayed at a boutique hotel and on the first day met colleagues in the dining room. After a while we were asked to move because the table had been reserved by someone else for dinner. This was fine, except the only other available seating in the whole building was two ornamental sofas on the second-floor landing. They didn’t appeal, so we moved next door to the Grand.

This is a big old- fashioned hotel and quickly we found a table with enough seating for all of us. However, each time one of us went to the bar or the lavatory, the waiter would take his or her chair away and give it to someone else. Later that night we arrived at a lovely restaurant where we had booked a table for 12. And it did indeed have a table around which 12 people could sit. But there were only 10 chairs. The same thing happened the next night, and the next. In our green room, backstage at the city’s ice hockey arena, we had a sofa and a chair. About half what we needed. A call went out for more seating, and two hours before we left to come home, a man arrived with a moth-eaten leatherette beanbag. Someone suggested that Sweden used to have enough chairs for everyone but Ikea had exported all of them to Britain.

I think, however, the real reason is that, in a socially democratic utopia such as this, it would be considered bourgeois if everyone could sit down at the same time. In Sweden everyone’s car was either light grey or dark grey. The sky was grey, too. And the sea. No one appeared to be rich and no one looked poor. The girls were pretty but not too pretty. And the buildings around the harbour were lovely in an unmemorable way. They’ve built a museum to house a ship that sank 380 years ago and were expecting 200,000 visitors a year. In fact they’re getting that many every two months and you sense they are actually quite embarrassed about the success. We see this sort of thing with the Swedish boat I used to take a tour of the archipelago. It was a 40ft carbon-fibre twin-engined cruiser with a price tag of £400,000.

That’s a huge amount of money for a boat of this size, so to make sure it appealed to the locals it had been styled to look like a Somalian’s fridge and fitted with an interior that put me in mind of a budget French hotel. Naturally, it was licensed to carry eight but there were only six seats. This is what you have to remember about Sweden. You can have money but you’d better not let it show. They would find a Sunseeker “revolting”. They would think My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding was science fiction. They’ve even named themselves after a nondescript vegetable. Which brings me on to the ideal Swedish car. It’s the new five-seat BMW 328i, which in Stockholm is probably sold to school-run mums as an eight-seat MPV. The BMW 3-series is now one of only two traditional four-door saloons to feature in Britain’s top 10 bestseller list, which means it must strike a chord here, too. And it’s not hard to see why: it’s the modern-day Ford Cortina. A no-nonsense design, done well. Well, when I say no-nonsense . . . In the olden days a BMW 328i would have had a 2.8-litre engine and it would have had six cylinders.

But, to keep the European Union green counters happy, the latest 328i has a 2-litre four-cylinder turbo. Despite the smallness, you get 241bhp, a bit more than in the equivalent Audi, but the BMW produces only 147 carbon dioxides. For a car with this much oomph, that is deeply impressive. There are many reasons for this. One is the cleverness of the turbocharger design, which not only keeps the polar bears happy but also eliminates lag. It must be there — the chasm between putting your foot down and picking up speed — but you really can’t feel it. Then there’s weight. Even though the new car is bigger than the old one, it weighs about 40kg less. That’s good for the ecos, and as a bonus it makes the whole package feel livelier.

And it really does feel very lively indeed. It doesn’t tear your face off, and it doesn’t make much of a noise, but this car can make serious progress, blurring its way though the eight cogs in the optional automatic gearbox and humming a happy little tune to itself as you scythe past other traffic and arc through corners as if you were a world championship water-ski-ist. This car is more like a scientific instrument than a means of transport. It’s delightful. The gearlever is a bit annoying. It always bongs at you when you try to move it about, but the Sport/Normal selector is a joy. You simply press a button and then choose which bit of the car you’d like to be what. The best solution? Lots of speed and a nice comfy ride. Then it’s even better than delightful. However, there are one or two issues that need to be addressed.

First of all, it looks pinched. In the past, all BMWs looked as if their body had been stretched to fit over the wheels. It’s what made them look purposeful. There was a sense the shell could barely contain the power that lay within. But the new car looks pinched — like an elephant on a unicycle. And it takes a very keen eye to tell the fast 328i from the cement salesman’s diesel. I’m all in favour of quiet restraint and hiding your light under a bushel when you are out and about. But BMW has gone too far with this new car. It’s a bit too Swedish. The interior is beautifully organised and well made but the 328i I tested was fitted with a steering wheel that felt as if it was covered in sandpaper. Cheap doesn’t really begin to describe the pound-shop nature of this item.

And it gets worse because my car was equipped with optional wood trim of such monumental terribleness, I longed for every journey to end so I could get out and not look at it any more. It looks exactly like the “wood” used to make a Disneyland log canoe. In other words, it doesn’t look like wood at all. It looks like Fred Flintstone’s club. Like a giant Cadbury Flake. The sort of thing that no one, not even Wayne Rooney, would find appealing, attractive, interesting, tasteful, desirable, nice or real. Then there’s the problem with buying a 3-series. Go on, try it. Engage your internet, go to BMW’s website and try to make sense of what’s there. You can’t. Not till you’ve found your reading glasses, and then gone to Boots to buy a pair that is even more powerful. And even when you are able to read the microdot typeface, your computer won’t have the plug-in necessary to enjoy any of the site’s features. Not that you will understand what’s on offer anyway, because it’s either flowery rubbish or techno gobbledygook. Soon you will give up with the complexity and buy something else. Well, I would, and that’s a shame because whatever you buy will be worse.