We offer a possible alternative in the last paragraph.
Well, this is asking price for a BMW ALPINA E30 coupe that has been tuned further by MANHART in Germany. This E30 was first registered in March 1988 and now has 12,480 kilometers on the odometer with full detailed service history (very low mileage for a 32-year-old car). The car is on sale for a hefty 165,500 Euros in Germany or for export without the 19 percent VAT it is still a high 139,076 Euros.
The BMW E30 is already a highly desirable vehicle. The rarest and most coveted of them all is the ALPINA tuned version and this is why used prices are moving upwards fast. ALPINA Burkard Bovensiepen GmbH & Co. KG is an automobile manufacturing company based in Buchloe, in the Ostallgäu district of Bavaria, Germany that develops and sells high-performance versions of BMW cars. ALPINA has been working closely with BMW for years and their processes are integrated into BMW’s tuned by them.
The very first ALPINA tuned BMW E30 was the C1 2.3 and it introduced in 1983 and featured a revised version of the previous generation’s 2316cc straight-six engine but it failed to impress despite an improvement in power output of 30bhp over the standard E30’s 137bhp.
The camshaft that was used was particularly aggressive, only coming alive after 3500rpm, and when BMW boosted its factory model to 148bhp that same year, it somewhat reduced the advantage of owning the ALPINA tuned version.
Just a few years later ALPINA introduced a bigger-engined version of the E30 which was the B6 2.8 and it had a production run of just 259 units. Power came from a small-block M60 engine, modified with a 323i crank and Mahle pistons, with capacity reduced to 2554cc and power upped to 182bhp. Despite impressive performance figures, the 2.5 didn’t exactly fly out of the showrooms; it wasn’t until its big brother was launched in 1986 that this tuned E30 finally captured the imaginations of buyers.
Now, this 3.4-liter BMW E30 delivers an impressive 407bhp or 299kW. MANHART has advertised the car as a ALPINA B7S Turbo with a brand new gearbox, brand new rear axle and all wear and tear parts have been replaced. This means, even though this car has a low mileage it has been driven hard for all these parts to need replacing after just 12,000 plus kilometers of driving.
From our research, ALPINA never built and sold a E30 with a B7 Turbocharged engine at that time. Only the BMW E28 sedan was produced with a B7 turbocharged engine. Therefore, this E30 has had an engine transplant or it was a special order from ALPINA from day one.
This is probably why the high asking price. We did a quick check online for used ALPINA tuned cars in Britain and this is what we found.
A stock BMW ALPINA E30 with a 2.5 engine will fetch about RM240,500 in England and a 1986 BMW ALPINA B7 E28 sedan (which is not as valuable as a BMW E28 M5) will fetch about RM381,700. So, we suggest for less money you buy the above two ALPINA cars instead of the just one MANHART tuned version for RM650,000.
