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Originally Posted by bimmerfun  Thanks, RAiMa! There is something endearing about these little BMW's that you have to love. There are tons of them in Europe, but you really don't see that many in the US. |
I dunno about 'tons', I think Compacts accounted for less than 20% of e36s sold in Europe, and I think the figure is quite a bit lower for the e46 (blame the Rover headlights and Lexus tail-lights, lol) so relatively speaking they are still something of a rarity, especially the M-Sport models. Admittedly mainland Europe might be another story, going by the YouTube clips of people doing doughnuts in car parks they all seem to have found their way into the former Eastern Bloc - Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania etc etc. I suspect this is because they have all been exported from Germany. The German government boosts their car industry by making it much more expensive to run a car once it's more than about five years old - plus they have a 'scrappage' type scheme where the government subsidises a few hundred towards the cost of a newer car when you are taking an old one off the road. In practise this means that loads of fairly low-mileage cars in decent condition are shipped out of the country and sold elsewhere, although the practise is often condemned as being unnecessarily wasteful of resources...