640 delight — bang on the money for BMW lovers

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Friday, January 20, 2012

I am fairly certain that if you were to walk into a BMW showroom right now and asked the salesperson about the ready availability of a new 640d, with a raft of additional extras which brought the price of said machine up to an eye-watering €113,000, they would be overcome with a powerful and debilitating weakness.

Just a few short years ago it might have been relatively commonplace for people to make such requests, but in post-boom Ireland, I’m afraid, the number of people with the wherewithal to do so makes for a very small crew indeed.

That is not to say this is a bad car or anything — far from it, but it’s just that there are few enough people around who could afford such a thing and even fewer with the stoutness of neck required to drive around in a 12 reg blunderbuss of this nature.

It’s a great car and while BMW will undoubtedly sell shed-loads of them in markets untainted by the global financial crisis – China, India, Brazil and the greater oil-rich Arab world, as well as traditional European strongholds in Germany and France, they will not be doing so in austerity-hit countries.

The 640d are that it is powered by a straight six 2,993 cc twin turbo diesel engine which outputs some 230 kW (313 bhp) and a massive 630 Nm of torque; this in turn translates into a startling 5.5 second 0-100 kph time and a top speed limited to 250 kph.

This is a truly effortless engine to drive and one which seems to have boundless and seamless power available.

Its eight-speed gearbox is a beauty and always seems to be in exactly the right cog; it is certainly not anything like as jumpy and interfering as other eight speed auto boxes we’ve tried.

On the road the car is rock solid and this may partly have to do with the optional Adaptive Drive suspension (that’ll be €5,000 extra, please) which brings electronically controlled and adjustable suspension to the party.

This does tend to leave things on the firm side, but anyone who knows what their right shoe is for will not mind that because as speed ratchets up, so too does the tautness of the handling.

This is a four seater, but not really that you’d notice as you’d have trouble getting a Poodle in the back, not to mind an adult.

Then again, potential purchasers aren’t exactly looking for practicality here.

Oh, and if you play golf, forget it.

But listen, if you’ve got a rather large sum of money stashed and want to get rid of it quickly, there are worse things you could do than spending it on a 640d. There are many good coupes out there right now, not many with the stage presence this thing has in spades, nor many with its abilities.