Seventy Dollars Apart
BMW built the sharpest small coupe it had made in twenty years, priced it within a rounding error of a 3 Series, sold roughly eight hundred of them in North America, and quietly turned out the lights. Everybody made the sensible choice. Thirteen years later, that is exactly why this one is worth finding.
Seventy dollars. That is what separated the two cars on the showroom floor in the fall of 2012, and it is the entire story of the BMW 1 Series in America compressed into a single number. A 2013 135is coupe, the hottest non-M version of BMW's smallest car, listed at $44,145 with destination. A 2013 335i sedan, brand new on the F30 platform, four doors, more room, more badge, more everything, listed at $44,075. Seventy dollars apart. Less than the floor mats.
Put that choice in front of ten thousand American buyers and you already know how it goes. It is not close. It was never close. In 2013 BMW sold 7,220 examples of the 1 Series in the United States and 119,521 of the 3 Series. The little coupe went out of production in the summer of 2013 with barely a press release to mark it, and the enthusiast internet spent about a week being sad before moving on to whatever came next.
And every one of those buyers was right. That is the part people get wrong about this story. The 3 Series was the correct answer to the question being asked in a BMW showroom in 2012 — it had the doors, the back seat, the trunk, the resale, the badge your neighbor could identify from across the street. Nobody was fooled into buying the wrong car. They bought the sensible one, on purpose, and they got what they paid for.
The 3 Series was the correct answer. It just was not the interesting one. And because almost nobody chose the interesting one, there are now about eight hundred of these in North America, and the sensible car is a used car while this one is starting to be something else entirely.
What BMW Actually Built
The 135is arrived in May 2012 as a 2013 model and left when the E82 line died the following summer. One model year. No sequel. BMW's own announcement gave it the thinnest possible justification, describing it as a continuation of the company's "s" model tradition, which is corporate for we needed something to sell now that the 1 Series M Coupe is gone.
Underneath was the N55 — and BMW is unambiguous about this in its own release, which describes "BMW's award winning TwinPower Turbo 3.0-liter inline-6 engine (N55) featuring Valvetronic throttle-less intake technology, direct injection and a single twin-scroll turbocharger." One turbo, not the two of the earlier N54 cars. BMW quoted 320 horsepower at 5,800 rpm and 317 lb-ft from 1,500 rpm, twenty horsepower and seventeen lb-ft over a standard 135i, and was vague about how it got there. The release says only that the engine "has been tuned." Reviewers who drove it against a standard 135i concluded the difference came from a revised calibration and the free-breathing BMW Performance exhaust that was a $1,250 option on the lesser car and standard here.
The cooling system got a bigger, more powerful radiator fan and an auxiliary radiator. The final drive got double-helical ball bearings, which cut friction and let BMW run less oil in the diff. The M Sport package came standard, along with sport seats, stainless pedals, the M Sport wheel, and if you ticked the box, black leather with blue contrast stitching. Six-speed manual standard, seven-speed dual-clutch optional.
2013 BMW 135is — the numbers
Two things to flag rather than bury. First, no American magazine ever gave the 135is a full instrumented workout that can be verified at source; the 4.6-second figure and the 148-foot stop circulate widely and are attributed to Car and Driver, but the original test could not be confirmed for this piece. Edmunds, reviewing the car, wrote plainly: "Though we've yet to test it, we suspect it will easily run to 60 mph in under 5 seconds when equipped with the manual transmission." Second, the 135is did not have a limited-slip differential. BMW's own release says "electronic rear brake management is used to simulate a differential lock." The clever new bearings in the final drive are an efficiency measure, not a traction device, and more than one write-up has read "new differential" and printed "LSD." It is open, in both transmissions. The 1 Series M Coupe, by contrast, did get the real thing — the E92 M3's mechanical limited-slip differential, locking up to 100 percent. That is one of the few places where the M car is a genuinely different animal rather than a better-dressed one, and it is the single most worthwhile thing you can add to a 135is later.
The Way It Moves
Strip away the badge argument and the price argument and the sales argument, all of which I am going to make in a minute, and what is left is a small rear-drive coupe with a straight six over the front axle, a 104.7-inch wheelbase, and hydraulic power steering. In 2013 that was already an anachronism. In 2026 it reads like a museum placard.
BMW had moved the mainstream 3 Series to electric assistance with the F30 in 2012. The E82 soldiered on to the end of its run with a hydraulic rack, which means the 135is is one of the last cars BMW sold in America where the front tires talk to your palms through fluid rather than through a software engineer's best guess at what fluid feels like.
Michael Karesh, writing at TrueDelta, put his finger on the specific character of it: the steering is "much heavier than that in most other BMWs," a car that feels slightly sullen when you are ambling and then, in his words, "get a little (or a lot) less casual behind the wheel, though, and both the steering and the car come alive." Pushed, he found it "agile, balanced, tight, composed."
The short wheelbase is the other half of the equation, and it is the half you feel first. Four inches shorter between the axles than an E90 3 Series, six inches shorter overall, nearly three inches narrower. The car changes direction the way a terrier changes direction, which is to say suddenly and with total commitment. BMWBLOG called it "razor sharp." Autoweb's Lyndon Bell, who tested one in early 2013, wrote that it was "nicely balanced and exhibiting minimal body roll" and that "the 135is gives you a very strong sense of confidence."
Then there is the noise. The BMW Performance exhaust is the single most transformative thing on the car, and it is also the thing most likely to get you a note from a neighbor.
Karesh was less charmed and more honest about living with it: "When cruising the exhaust drones. Lift off the accelerator and it snaps, crackles, and pops." His verdict on the social consequences is the funniest line in the whole 135is archive. "Bystanders' ears will inform them you're hooning the car, even when you're not."
Seyth Miersma at Autoblog drove it in May 2013 and landed on the sentence that everybody who has spent a weekend in one eventually arrives at independently: "There's not a paved road in the world that this car isn't prepared to let you enjoy." He also called it "a driver's car, not a Brookstone store at the mall," which tells you exactly what he thought the rest of the BMW lineup had become by 2013.
How Quick Is It, Really
Go looking for acceleration numbers on any of these cars and you will find four different answers and conclude somebody is lying. Nobody is lying. Some magazines subtract a one-foot rollout, the sliver of distance a drag-strip beam allows before the clock starts, and some measure from a dead stop. Edmunds publishes both off the same run, which makes the gap impossible to argue with.
Two to four tenths, every time. Then add the variable nobody mentions: when Edmunds ran an E46 M3 against a 135i in 2008, the M3 was not a press car. It was a used one they owned, with more than 50,000 miles on it. A new one in 2001 ran 4.7. Both numbers are real.
Which is why the honest comparison is one where a single crew tested everything the same way, with no rollout, over twenty-five years.
Read that twice. In 2001 MotorWeek measured an E46 M3 at 5.0 seconds to 60, 13.5 in the quarter at 107 mph, and 112 feet from 60 to zero. In 2008 the same crew, on the same tarmac, measured a 135i at 5.0 seconds, 13.5 at 107, and 112 feet. Not close — identical, line for line.
The 1M looks slow at 5.1 until you notice it ran the quarter in 13.1 at 110, four tenths and three miles an hour clear of both. That is a car losing time at the launch and taking all of it back once it hooks up.
As for the 135is: no verifiable American instrumented test of one exists. MotorWeek never got a car. Edmunds said outright it had not tested one. Car and Driver is widely credited with 4.6 seconds and a 148-foot stop from 70, and the 70–0 format is Car and Driver's signature, so it very probably happened — but I could not open it, and I will not print a number as gospel that I have not read myself. A car that fast, that rare, that cheap, and the buff books could not be bothered to put one on a skidpad.
Now the Part Nobody Puts in the Brochure
I said I would be two-sided about this and I meant it. The 135is is not a scalpel. It is a very fast, very charismatic car with an open differential, run-flat tires, and a nose that will eventually stop turning if you keep asking.
BimmerFile spent a final week with one in August 2013, as production was ending, and wrote the harshest paragraph in the car's press history — the paragraph a prospective buyer needs to read. The car is wonderful, they said, "until you approach the limit and experience the apocalyptic level of understeer. That, my friends, is not how a BMW should behave." They also noted that despite weighing only 77 pounds more than a 1 Series M Coupe, the 135is "feels dramatically heavier, lacking in precision and control at the limit," and that "you have to work hard to get the tail out in any satisfying manner."
This is not new. Edmunds found the same thing five years earlier: "Like the larger 335i, the 1 Series coupe lacks the exacting precision required to drive with full confidence on a road course." And crucially, Josh Jacquot identified why, in a sentence that doubles as the car's defense: "The very traits that make the 135i so quick in the real world — suspension compliance and forgiving handling — hurt its racetrack performance."
That is the whole thing. This is a road car that gets embarrassed on a track and humiliates almost everything on a mountain. Which of those two situations you actually live in should determine whether you buy one.
Same Edmunds test, different sentence, and this one is the reason the 135i has a cult: "On the tightest, twistiest roads, the 135i is unquestionably the car to have. Offering the perfect combination of nimbleness, suspension compliance and tractable power delivery, it is easily the most rapid car over mountain roads."
It beat the E46 M3 to do it. In that April 2008 three-way, the 135i tied for first place overall on 78.0 points, and the instrumented sheet was not subtle about why.
| 0–60 | 1/4 mile | 60–0 | Skidpad | Slalom | Weight | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 BMW 135i | 5.0 s | 13.3 @ 104.0 | 109 ft | 0.89 g | 72.4 mph | 3,399 lb |
| 2008 BMW 335i | 5.2 s | 13.5 @ 103.7 | 109 ft | 0.88 g | 71.6 mph | 3,542 lb |
| 2002 BMW M3 (E46) | 5.4 s | 13.7 @ 103.3 | 109 ft | 0.89 g | 71.0 mph | 3,472 lb |
The smallest, cheapest car in the test was the quickest car in the test, and the fastest through the cones. The M3 was a 50,000-mile used car, which is worth saying every time these numbers get quoted. Source: Edmunds, "2002 BMW M3 vs. 2008 BMW 135i vs. 2008 BMW 335i," Josh Jacquot.
It Started Out Honest
Here is where the story turns, and where the answer to the question everybody asks about this car actually lives. Was the 1 Series priced so close to a 3 Series that buyers just took the bigger car?
Yes. But not at first, and that distinction is the whole tragedy.
When the 1 Series landed in America for 2008, it undercut the 3 Series by real money. A 135i coupe was $35,675 with destination. A 328i coupe was about $36,425. The hot version of the small car cost less than the base version of the big one, and it undercut a 335i coupe by roughly $6,350 while running to 60 mph two-tenths quicker. That is a proposition. That is a reason to walk into the small end of the showroom.
Five years later the daylight was gone.
Look at that bottom row again. In 2013 the flagship 1 Series was not undercutting the 3 Series at all. It was the more expensive car. Seventy dollars more expensive than a brand-new 335i sedan, and only $1,880 under a 335i coupe, for a smaller cabin on an older platform.
Here is the whole 2013 showroom, laid out cheapest to dearest, so you can see exactly where each car sat.
Two things jump out. The 128i was, and remains, the bargain of the range — twelve thousand dollars under the 135is and carrying a naturally aspirated straight six. And the plain 135i had crept $600 above a 328i coupe and $2,450 above a 328i sedan. Whatever the 1 Series had been in 2008, by 2013 it was not the value play.
Somebody saw this coming. In June 2007, six months before the car reached American showrooms, BusinessWeek warned that "BMW has to tread carefully to avoid ending up with dealer lots full of cars priced too closely to the ubiquitous 3-Series," and that "there might be surprisingly little green for the taking by the time BMW eventually gets there."
That is a five-year-old prophecy filed under obvious in hindsight. It was obvious in foresight too.
Did Anybody Buy One?
Not many, and the trend line is grim. These are BMW of North America's own year-end figures.
Six model years, roughly sixty thousand cars. BMW sold more 3 Series in a good American quarter than it sold 1 Series in the model's entire life. But the raw count understates it. The ratio is what tells the story.
The gap was narrowest in 2010, at about eight 3 Series for every 1 Series, and then it doubled in three years. And BMW never separated 128i from 135i in its sales reporting, so nobody outside Munich knows how many of those sixty thousand cars were the fast one. Consumer Reports could not even publish reliability data for the 2013 1 Series, because it never got enough owner surveys back to reach statistical confidence. That is a strange and slightly haunting fact about a car from one of the largest luxury brands on earth.
The Funhouse Mirror
Berkowitz was not alone, and the styling took most of the incoming fire. Car and Driver's 2008 short take said the proportions seemed off, that the roof height looked excessive for the length, and produced the line that has followed this car for eighteen years: it looks like a 3-series coupe in a funhouse mirror. The same magazine allowed that it compensated with "bulldog-like character," which is either a compliment or a diagnosis depending on your mood.
Berkowitz went further and got personal: "There is nothing iconic or beautiful about the 135i. It's a rolling caricature of a virtually identical car." And then he made an argument I still think about, which is that BMW deliberately hobbled the 1 Series to protect the 3 Series — that the company wanted a car positioned below the 3 Series without actually having a car below the 3 Series.
MotorWeek's take was kinder and probably closer to the truth: "halo running lights, knife-edged character lines, and short overhangs, give the 1-Series coupe a stubby but very purposeful appearance," a car with "a spontaneous spark that some enthusiasts think larger BMWs have lost."
The defenders arrived late, which is how this always goes. By 2020 BimmerLife was writing that "the 128i's stubby proportions work well, thanks to the long hood and up-turned trunk lid." By 2023 Autoblog was calling the shape "beefy but at the same time rather feminine." Nothing about the car changed. We did.
The eighty percent that probably never was
You will read, in a lot of places, that 80 percent of 1 Series owners believed their car was front-wheel drive. Jalopnik repeated it in 2013. It is a wonderful statistic and it deserves to be true.
It probably is not. In 2010 Edward Niedermeyer at The Truth About Cars traced the claim back to a single blog post by Luca Ciferri at Automotive News Europe, noted that Ciferri linked to no source, that German searches turned up nothing but circular citations, and that BMW had an obvious motive to float it — the company was preparing to launch its first front-drive cars. His advice was to take it "with a hefty grain of salt."
I am including it as a story about a myth rather than as evidence, because it captures something real even if the number is invented: nobody, including the people who bought them, was entirely sure what the 1 Series was supposed to be.
The Car That Was Never Delivered
Of all the small indignities in this car's life, my favorite is the quietest one.
The 135is appears in Car and Driver's 2013 10Best nominee list. Not as a winner — as a nominee carrying an asterisk, and that asterisk means: this car met our eligibility requirements but was not available for evaluation.
BMW never sent one. The company built a limited-run, 320-horsepower farewell to its most enthusiast-flavored chassis, put it on the 10Best eligibility list, and then did not supply a press car to the most influential comparison test in American automotive publishing. Whether that was allocation, indifference, or a product planner who had already mentally moved on to the 2 Series, the result was the same. The 1 Series has never made 10Best. Not once, in six years of trying, in the same era when the 3 Series made it more or less by default.
And Then There Is the Convertible
Which almost nobody has ever written about, and that is not a figure of speech.
BMW built the 135is as a coupe and as an E88 convertible, at $48,845 with destination, and the buff books tested the coupe. Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Autoblog, Autoweb, MotorWeek — all coupe. In the entire period record I can find exactly two dedicated road tests of the 135is Convertible, both from enthusiast sites, both from July 2013, both essentially unread. That is the most overlooked version of the most overlooked BMW of its decade.
It is a proper cloth roof, not a folding hardtop — three layers, heated glass rear window, up or down in 22 seconds and operable on the move at up to 25 mph, with pop-up roll hoops behind the rear headrests that deploy in fractions of a second if the car senses it is going over. Two golf bags fit in the trunk with the top down, a detail BMW was weirdly proud of. It weighs 3,638 pounds, about 265 more than the coupe, most of that in the structural reinforcement the open body needed.
You would expect that weight to have ruined it. Both reviewers say it did not. Harvey Schwartz at Automotive Addicts wrote that "BMW engineers designed the body with great resistance to vibration, even on sharp bumps," found "just a hint of oversteer when at the apex of a curve," and described a ride that is "stiff but it works well, never harsh." John Kucek at Speed:Sport:Life found "little roll and plenty of grip," steering that is "typical BMW — weighty and accurate," and made the aesthetic case nobody else has: "The convertible, if anything, streamlines the coupe's taller greenhouse and visually lengthens the body."
Neither of them mentions cowl shake. Not once.
And then Kucek says the thing that ought to move a few of you into the convertible column permanently.
He still recommends the coupe to "the dynamic type," and he is right that the coupe is the enthusiast's default. But consider what the convertible actually is: the same engine, the same steering, the same wheelbase, a body BMW spent real money stiffening, an exhaust that is demonstrably better with the roof stowed — and, if the forum tallies hold, roughly 230 of them in North America against 586 coupes. Two and a half times rarer than the rare one.
The market has not worked this out yet, which is the interesting part. A 43,000-mile convertible made $25,000 on Bring a Trailer in July 2025; a 67,000-mile one made $26,750 a month earlier. Those are at or above what comparable automatic coupes bring. What the convertible lacks is not value — it is a ceiling. Every headline result belongs to a low-mileage manual coupe, and I could not find a single confirmed public auction sale of a manual 135is convertible anywhere.
Somebody is going to find one of those. It will not be expensive. It should be.
Standing in the 1M's Shadow
The other thing that happened to the 135is is that it was born into a comparison it could not win.
The 1 Series M Coupe had come and gone in a single model year. Roughly 6,300 cars worldwide against an original plan for 2,700; BMW M's own brand manager put the American allocation at 740 units, though other published figures run higher. It was a skunkworks car, an M division side project with the E92 M3's differential and suspension knuckles bolted to the small chassis, and it was canonized more or less on delivery.
So when BMW announced the 135is in May 2012, The Truth About Cars ran it under a headline that pre-wrote every review that followed: BMW 135is, Because We Can't Have The 1M Anymore. Kelley Blue Book was more diplomatic and said the same thing, noting that neither the coupe nor the convertible was "a direct replacement for" the departed 1M. Autoblog's Miersma, who liked the car a great deal, still put the effect as "just slightly less inflammatory than that made by the now-axed 1 Series M Coupe."
Consolation prize. That was the frame, and it stuck.
But here is the thing about halos, and CarBuzz put it well in 2025: the 1M did not really overshadow the 135i so much as retroactively legitimize it. The 1M proved that this chassis, this wheelbase, this weight, this steering rack were capable of something genuinely special. And the 135i and 135is are the affordable way to buy into that proof. The M car did the arguing. The regular cars get to keep the verdict.
There is a longer argument to have about why the 1M exists at all — whether it was a deliberate corrective to the V8 M3 or a happy accident of the parts bin, and what BMW itself said on the record at the time. I have made that case separately, because it deserves the room. The short version is that the homage is real and the corrective is retrofitted, and that the 135is is the same accident one rung further down the range.
Nobody at BMW set out to build a small, loud, hydraulically steered, straight-six, manual-available coupe as a statement about what the company used to be. They set out to move some metal in the last year of a slow-selling model line. The car came out the way it did because of what was on the shelf, what the chassis already was, and what the exhaust supplier could deliver by autumn.
It just so happens that what was on the shelf, in 2013, was the last of everything.
Rarity Is the Whole Point
Fewer than you would guess, and the honest answer is that nobody knows precisely, because BMW has never published a figure.
The number that circulates — repeated by CarMax's own blog and by CarBuzz, traceable back to forum tallies rather than to Munich — is 586 coupes and 230 convertibles for North America.
Treat those as well-worn estimates rather than facts. But even at the low end of plausible, it puts the 135is in the same rarity bracket as the 1 Series M Coupe — roughly 800 of one against somewhere between 740 and 980 of the other in America. Two cars built in comparable numbers, sold within three thousand dollars of each other, and one of them now costs about three times the other.
And this is the part where the sales chart stops being a sad story and starts being the argument.
Everything that made the 1 Series a commercial disappointment in 2013 is now an asset. It did not sell, so there are very few. It was never taken seriously, so nobody hoarded them. It looked odd next to a 3 Series, so it got bought by people who wanted it rather than people who wanted a BMW. Rarity is not a consolation for having failed in the market — rarity is exclusivity, and it is the one thing you cannot buy back later. There is no reissue coming.
Meanwhile the thing it was accused of — being a slightly smaller 3 Series — has turned into the compliment. It has the 3 Series running gear, the 3 Series straight six, the 3 Series build quality and every luxury you actually need, wrapped in something four inches shorter that will still take a backroad apart. That is not a compromise anymore. In a market where everything has grown, that is the entire specification.
Read the middle of that chart. The 2 Series coupe BMW sells today is longer than the 3 Series sedan the 135is was told it was too close to. The replacement for the small car outgrew the big car it was supposed to sit beneath. That is not a trend that reverses.
Which is why a 3,373-pound, 172-inch, hydraulically steered coupe with a straight six and a manual gearbox reads the way it does now. The car is about the drive, not the destination. It is like biting down on a fresh piece of spearmint gum and feeling that cool arctic air run through your mouth — a breath of fresh air, in a segment that has been holding its breath for a decade.
What They Cost Now
There are two used markets for this car and they disagree with each other by a factor of two, which is exactly what you would expect from a model where a curated auction car and a 110,000-mile dealer trade wear the same badge.
On the auction side, Classic.com's tracked 135is sales average $23,424 with a spread from $7,100 to $34,500. On the retail side, J.D. Power's average price paid sits around $11,325. Both are describing something real. Neither is describing the car you actually want.
| Date | Miles | Body / transmission | Sold |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2026 | 44k | Coupe, 6-speed manual | $34,500 |
| Feb 2026 | 22k | Coupe, DCT | $28,750 |
| Jun 2025 | 67k | Convertible | $26,750 |
| Mar 2026 | 67k | Coupe, 6-speed manual | $25,000 |
| Jul 2025 | 43k | Convertible | $25,000 |
| Dec 2025 | — | Coupe, 6-speed manual | $21,750 |
| Jun 2026 | 38k | Convertible, DCT | $19,000 |
| Aug 2026 | 101k | Coupe, DCT | $18,000 |
| Mar 2026 | 72k | Coupe, DCT | $15,500 |
The high-water mark is a 27,000-mile six-speed coupe that made about $43,000 on Bring a Trailer in February 2025. That is an eighteen-month-old result and should not be read as today's market.
Sensible working numbers: a high-mileage or modified 135is is a $10,000 to $16,000 car. A clean sub-60,000-mile DCT car is $19,000 to $26,000. A low-mileage six-speed is $28,000 and up, and the very best have touched the low forties.
Against a plain 135i, which averages $17,796 across all years on the same data and which BMWBLOG described in May 2026 as available for "roughly $11,000 to $13,000 — or less than half the price of a new Toyota Corolla," the 135is carries about a 32 percent premium. Earned, if you want the exhaust and the badge and the one-year-only story. Not earned, if you would rather spend the difference on a proper limited-slip differential and a set of non-run-flat tires, which is a defensible position and one I would not argue with for long.
The manual premium is real but narrower than the folklore suggests. It shows up clearly at the collectible end — the top of the market is manual, full stop — and essentially vanishes on high-mileage drivers, where a 65,000-mile manual 135i recently sold for less than a 64,000-mile automatic. And note that the alternative here is a seven-speed dual-clutch, not a torque-converter slushbox, which is why it is not punished the way an automatic E90 is.
One honest warning before you go looking, because a cheap BMW is not the same thing as an inexpensive one. RepairPal rates the 135i two out of five and ranks it seventeenth of seventeen luxury compact cars, with average annual repair costs of $1,031 against a class average of $801. Every warranty extension BMW ever granted this platform — the fuel pump, the injectors, the wastegates — was capped from the original in-service date, and the newest E82 went into service in 2013. You inherit all of the failure modes and none of the coverage. The water pump and the plastic charge pipe are a when, not an if.
How to buy one, in six lines
- Buy 2011 or later. N55, not N54, unless you have specific big-power ambitions and a specific tolerance for pain.
- Buy on service history, not on mileage or price. A documented water pump, thermostat and oil filter housing gasket is worth more than 20,000 fewer miles.
- Pre-purchase inspection at a BMW independent. Non-negotiable.
- Budget the water pump and thermostat as a when, not an if. Budget the gaskets as scheduled maintenance.
- Fit an aluminum charge pipe before you fit anything else, and before you even think about a tune.
- Check the 135is-specific trim — the wheels, the black grilles, the blue-stitched leather. Low production means model-specific cosmetic parts are the ones most likely to be a problem, even though mechanical parts remain abundant.
The Back Door
Now the argument that should actually put this car on your list.
In 2011, a 1 Series M Coupe cost $47,010 and a 135is cost $44,145. The M car was 6.5 percent more expensive. Six and a half percent.
Today the 1M averages $63,167 at auction, good ones ask $70,000 to $92,000, and a four-thousand-mile car made $92,000 in June. It has essentially never depreciated. Hagerty called it an instant collectible and it has stayed one. Fine — but that car is now a purchase, not a car, and the people buying them are increasingly not the people driving them.
The 135is shares the chassis, the wheelbase, the hydraulic steering, the straight six, the short overhangs, the whole physical argument. It gives up the M division's differential, its wider track, its knuckles and its 15 extra horsepower, and in exchange it costs about a third as much and you will not feel guilty putting 8,000 miles a year on it.
The verdict
The 1M is the better car and always was. The 135is is the better buy, by a margin that is no longer close, and the gap between those two sentences is where all the fun in this hobby lives.
Why It Should Be On Your Shopping List
Because it is the last small rear-drive BMW coupe with hydraulic steering, and BMW is not going to build another one. The 2 Series that replaced it was longer in every dimension and started its life by swapping the entry model's naturally aspirated six for a turbocharged four. The 1 Series that BMW sells today in Europe drives its front wheels. There is no path back.
Because 320 horsepower and 317 lb-ft from 1,500 rpm in a 3,373-pound car is still, in 2026, quick enough that you will never once wish for more on a public road, and because the N55 responds to a five-hundred-dollar piggyback or a flash tune with a claimed forty to sixty more horsepower at the wheels, if you decide you want it anyway.
Because roughly eight hundred of them came to North America and almost nobody noticed, and because the enthusiast market has spent thirteen years slowly working out what it had. Jalopnik called it in May 2013, before the car was even dead: "some 10, 15, or 20 years from now, the 1-Series may be what the E30 is to buyers today." That was thirteen years ago. The clock is most of the way through.
And because of the seventy dollars.
In 2012, a buyer standing in a BMW showroom with $44,000 chose between a small, loud, hydraulically steered, one-year-only coupe and a brand new 335i sedan, and almost every one of them took the sedan. They were not wrong. It was the sensible car, and sensible is what most people need most of the time.
That 2013 335i sedan is now a $14,000 used car that nobody will ever write about again. There were 119,521 of them sold that year alone.
There were about eight hundred of the other one.
Seventy dollars.
Why the 1 Series was rear-wheel drive when nothing else in its class was, and whether the 1 Series M Coupe really was BMW M apologizing for the V8 M3. A theory, tested.