THREE GERMAN WAGONS GO TO THIS AIRFIELD, RIGHT... C63 VS M3 VS RS4.
It’s quite weird how some car guys have a fascination with avant-style cars, this here SXdrv man included. It’s a little hard to pinpoint, but it may just hark back to the mid to late 90s and watching tapes of the British Touring Car Championship and the German DTM Series and the Volvo 850R Estates driven by legendary drivers Rickard Rydell and Jan Lammer. For some reason seeing a long and low car with the aerodynamics of a brick in the wind tilting on two wheels through high-speed chicanes sorta sticks with you. There have been others over the years that are also memorable, but the world stopped liking them and so many automakers stopped making them. One of the longest-running is the Audi RS4, when it was launched in 2000 it became an instant favourite and has been on the new car vision board ever since. While all generations are great cars, the 2006-2008 B7 RS4 is the one to have, although that’s beside the point here. The latest generation of the RS4 is a proper performance-oriented car, and for the last while it’s only had the Mercedes-AMG C63 as a competitor, which in itself is also a beast of a performance wagon, more competition is always a good thing. At the end of 2022, things changed when BMW announced the M3 Touring, a car that BMW M fanatics have been imagining for as long as the BMW E30 wagon has been around. That means there are now three German wagons in the world that compete in the same market segment for the same buyers, and the world is a better place for it. Each of these cars offers something a little different, but if you’re genuinely interested in buying one, the only way to help make a choice is to read online reviews and watch a bunch of motoring journos and celebs drive the kak out of them. In this instance though, the drivers are all part of the Carwow crew headed up by Mat Watson, and they put these three German wagons through their paces on a UK runway over the usual quarter-mile test distance as well as the bumping it up to the half mile to see how much the results change, or not.
The new kid on the wagon block is the BMW M3 Touring which features the usual BMW M powerplant in the form of a twin-turbocharged inline-six that kicks out a healthy figure of 375 kW with 650 Nm of torque (the latest update sees that power at 390 kW) and its mated to an 8-speed M Steptronic transmission with Drivelogic and the power is directed to all four corners via the M xDrive all-wheel-drive system and an Active M Differential at the rear. This car is capable of hitting the 100 km/h performance benchmark in 3.6-seconds, 200 km/h in just 12.9-seconds and has a top speed electronically limited to 250 km/h or 280 km/h with the appropriate optional package. It tips the scales at 1,865kg. The Audi RS4 Avant makes use of its sublime twin-turbocharged 2.9-litre V6 lump rated at 331 kW and 600 Nm - 44 kW and 50 Nm less than the M, but it’s lighter coming in with 245 kg less at 1,620 kg. It can hit 100 km/h in 4.1 seconds. The Mercedes-AMG dog in this fight is a mad one. That iconic V8 setup was chucked in favour of new technologies, and so this AMG C63 S Estate now features a powerful turbocharged 2.0-litre 4-cylinder lump that has some hybrid assistance and that makes it the most powerful of the trio. This mad thing is rated at 500 kW with a monstrous 1,020 Nm of torque and it can hit 100 km/h in 3.4 seconds and tops out at 280 km/h. The obvious downside is the car needs a battery pack and that means more weight, this hefty one is weighted at 2,190 kg. So the car has lost its iconic exhaust note, but it’s gained heaps of power and some proper performance. While there are a million factors at play when it comes to drag races and the results, we’re pretty sure that whopping torque figure will also translate into the fast of the wagons in this test, as much as we want the Audi to win.
Take a look at the YouTube video from Mr Watson and the crew over at Carwow that has them lining up three of the coolest German acronyms around, all in longroof guise. Our heart is with the RS4, but that M3 is also quite the thing, but we'd put an actual bet on the AMG: New AMG C63 vs BMW M3 vs Audi RS4: DRAG RACE | carwow
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News Avante Longroof Wagons BMW M3 Touring Audi RS 4 Avant Mercedes-AMG C63 S Estate SXdrv Drag Race