An expression of joy. A modern reinterpretation of the classic roadster. And the most quietly brilliant sports car of its era — overlooked then, coveted now, irreplaceable soon.
That is not a review. That is a portrait. And the fact that a video game — a racing game, no less — captured the Z4 sDrive35is with more accuracy and more poetry than most automotive journalists managed tells you something important about this car. It exists on a frequency that the spec-sheet crowd never quite tuned into. They were too busy timing laps and measuring cornering forces to ask the question that actually matters: what does it feel like to drive this thing at seven in the morning on a canyon road you know by heart, with the roof folded away and the six-cylinder waking up behind you?
The answer, if you have experienced it, is that it feels like exactly what the world was made for. The Z4 sDrive35is is not trying to be the fastest two-seat sports car of its era. It is not competing with the Boxster for lap times or with the Lotus Elise for cornering G-forces. It is trying to be something more rare and more valuable than any of those things: the perfect roadster. The distinction matters enormously. A sports car is a tool. A roadster is an experience. The Z4 35is is, without qualification or apology, the latter — and in being the latter with absolute conviction it became one of the most underappreciated machines of the modern era. The world drove past it. That, as it turns out, was the world's mistake.
BMW's first self-engineered roadster. Unveiled at the Berlin Motor Show in May 1934 alongside the standard 315 saloon, the 315/1 was an immediate sensation. A long, sleek engine compartment. Two sports seats behind a low, raked windscreen. A rear end that tapered in an elegant aerodynamic sweep. Only 230 were ever built — priced at 5,200 Reichsmarks, the 315/1 was the preserve of the privileged few. Forty horsepower in a 725-kilogram machine with BMW's first inline-six proved enough to win the 1934 International Alpine Rally on its debut. It was the first expression of a DNA that would define the brand for ninety years.
The most beautiful car BMW ever made — and the one that nearly killed the company that made it. Designed by Count Albrecht von Goertz, a German-born pupil of Raymond Loewy, the 507 debuted at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in 1955 and the press was rapturous. Its 3.2-litre all-aluminium V8, its long restrained hood, its flanks that flowed in a single unbroken arc — nothing matched it. Only 254 were ever built. Elvis Presley bought one while stationed in Germany and had it repainted red because his fans kept leaving lipstick marks on the white paint. That detail, more than any specification, tells you what kind of car it was. Today, surviving examples fetch over $2 million at auction — the most valuable BMWs ever produced.
The direct inheritor of that thread. Not the Z8, which was the 507's visual homage — though the Z8 was magnificent in its own right. Not the standard Z4, which was already exceptional. The 35is: the N54 twin-turbo with overboost torque, the 7-speed DCT tuned for combat, the Adaptive M suspension, the exhaust that started a quiet conversation at idle and became a full-voiced declaration at 4,500 rpm. Built in limited numbers. Bought by people who understood what they were choosing. The latest chapter of a story that began on a Berlin show stand in 1934 — the same long bonnet, the same two seats, the same fundamental argument that some journeys deserve a proper roadster.
The N54 twin-turbo 3.0-litre inline-six in the Z4 35is is not merely an engine. It is a philosophy expressed through engineering. In standard form the twin turbos produce 335 horsepower and 332 pound-feet of torque — numbers that would embarrass the naturally aspirated sports cars of the previous decade. But the 35is carries a trick that makes those already impressive numbers feel almost conservative: the overboost function. Push hard for more than a few seconds and the system surges the torque figure to 369 pound-feet for a seven-second burst — a number that, applied through the rear tyres of a car weighing barely 3,300 pounds, produces the kind of mid-corner acceleration that rearranges your understanding of what a roadster is capable of.
The sound deserves its own paragraph because no specification captures it. At idle, it is measured, authoritative, a low mechanical pulse. From 2,500 rpm it begins to wake up. At 4,500 rpm the twin turbos are at full voice and the exhaust note firms into something that Evo Magazine described as "a wonderful howl at the redline that you never get tired of listening to." On downshifts through the 7-speed DCT, it crackles and blips with the enthusiasm of something that doesn't know it's supposed to be restrained. BimmerFile called the under-hard-acceleration sound "a vicious rap" — a two-word description that, once you have heard it, is impossible to improve upon. BMW engineered the sound deliberately, knowing that a roadster without aural involvement is a roadster with its most important feature missing.
The Need for Speed copywriters understood something that the mainstream press often missed about this car: the Z4 35is is not trying to win a competition. It is trying to make every journey worth taking the long way. The adaptive M suspension — firmer than the standard car's already engaging setup, more direct in its communication, more willing to tell you exactly what the tarmac beneath it is thinking — transforms the car's relationship with the road without making it punishing. It is supple where it needs to be supple. It is precise where precision is the point. The ride is more grand tourer than pure sports car, a philosophy that becomes more correct the longer you spend with it.
The power delivery through the twin turbos is linear in a way that sequential single-turbo engines rarely match. There is no surge point, no waiting for boost, no on-off quality that requires management. The torque is simply there, from 2,000 rpm through to the top of the rev range, building with a smoothness that makes the 369 pound-feet of overboost feel less like an event and more like a discovery — something the car was doing all along and only just decided to let you know about. BimmerFile's review called it "as close as BMW has gotten to an M car without the badge since the E46 ZHP," and argued it may have been closer. That is extraordinary praise from people who know what M cars feel like.
The elongated bonnet stretches away ahead of you like a promise. The shoulder line traces the car's flanks from behind the front arches to the muscular rear in a single unbroken sweep that Albrecht von Goertz would have recognised — the same long, low horizontal geometry that made the 507 the most beautiful car of its decade. With the roof folded away in its boot compartment, the sky arrives in its entirety. No partial aperture. No Targa bar bisecting the view. Just the road ahead, the bonnet pointing at the horizon, and the twin-turbo six doing what it was made for. You feel like you own the road the way you own a good story — completely, and with no obligation to share it.
"The Z4 is a finely balanced machine, with neutral handling traits that just beg you to learn it and toss it harder and harder into corners. The level of grip left even some of our favourite non-M BMWs feeling a little lacking."
— Winding Road Magazine, Z4 sDrive35is Track TestI remember the first time I drove one. I was living in SF and decided to take a road trip down the coast to Big Sur. Now that drive is sublime in almost any vehicle — and if you have never pointed a car south out of San Francisco on a clear morning with the whole California coast unspooling ahead of you, understand that this is not a drive the way your commute is a drive. It is one of the few stretches of road left on earth where the phrase drive of a lifetime actually undersells the thing. The painter Francis McComas called this coast the greatest meeting of land and water in the world, and he was not reaching for an effect. Do it in a rented econobox and you will still arrive a slightly different person than the one who set out. Do it with the roof folded into the boot of a Z4 sDrive35is, and you begin to suspect the car and the road were drawn up by the same hand, on the same afternoon, for the same reason.
Driving out of the city you feel the acceleration of the Z4 and the beauty of the tight turning — the steering quick enough and the car short enough that threading through traffic feels faintly like cheating — and then the on-ramp to Interstate 280 arrives and the whole character of the thing changes. This is the stretch California actually signposts as the world's most beautiful freeway, and it earns the billing: the rolling green hills of the Peninsula, the Crystal Springs reservoir flashing silver on your right, the coastal range rising soft and gold to the west. Once on 280 travelling south surrounded by the rolling hills you appreciate the comfort of the GT feel. The adaptive dampers go quietly slack. The straight-six drops to a murmur. The cabin stays calm enough to hold a conversation at eighty. This is the grand-touring half of the car's split personality, and it is so persuasive that for a few miles you forget the other half is in there at all.
Then you branch off and hit 92 west towards the coast where the chassis comes into its own. The road climbs over the hills toward Half Moon Bay and folds into a sequence of second- and third-gear corners, and the other half of the Z4 wakes up like a face full of cold seawater. This is where the overboost earns its keep: square up a corner, bury the throttle, and for seven seconds the torque swells from generous to faintly indecent — 369 lb-ft hunting through the rear tyres — and the car hunkers down and slingshots you at the next bend. The retuned steering tells you exactly what the front axle is doing. The DCT fires downshifts with a blip and a bark the engineers built in on purpose. And then you crest the last rise and the Pacific is simply there, vast and bright to the horizon, and the rest of his sentence lands precisely: the balance and handling is only muted by the sheer beauty of the scenery.
As you turn on to the PCH, with the wind in your hair and the ocean breeze flowing through your senses you are blessed and understand why this car was created. If you have only ever driven inside a sealed box, nothing prepares you for what an open car does to a coastline like this one. The scenery stops being a thing you watch through glass and becomes a thing you are physically inside of — the sudden cool as you pass through a shaded cut in the rock, the smell of salt and eucalyptus and cold kelp, the light coming up off the water and filling the whole cockpit like a tide. You roll through Half Moon Bay. The road opens into long, sweeping arcs above the surf. You pass the artichoke fields, and then, standing chalk-white against the blue, the Pigeon Point Lighthouse — at 115 feet the tallest on the West Coast, first lit in 1872, originally by a lamp that burned refined pig fat — looking for all the world as if it had been airlifted in from the coast of Maine.
The power, comfort, feel, the driving dynamic, this is your co-pilot all the way down through the beauty and quaintness of Monterey and Carmel where the Z4 styling fit in perfectly. You thread through Santa Cruz, around the long curve of Monterey Bay, into Monterey itself — Cannery Row, the working harbour, the silvered light John Steinbeck spent a whole career trying to get onto paper. Then Carmel-by-the-Sea, the storybook village of cottages with no street numbers, where Clint Eastwood once served as mayor and the entire town looks as though it has been gently art-directed. These are tasteful, old-money, almost European places, and the Z4 — restrained, beautifully proportioned, German in the very best sense — belongs in them completely. A louder car would look like it was shouting in church. The Z4 just looks like it was invited.
The last bit is full of edge of your seat cliff driving right on the coast which is both thrilling and surreal as the Z4 hugs the bends like an aunt at a family reunion. South of Carmel the road turns serious. This is the Big Sur Coast Highway — twenty-nine bridges flung across the canyons where the Santa Lucia Mountains fall straight into the sea, much of the road carved directly into the cliff face with nothing but air and a low stone wall between your front wheel and the surf two hundred feet below. You cross Bixby Creek Bridge, a single 360-foot concrete arch thrown across a chasm in 1932 — built under budget, in barely a year, during the Depression, by men lowering forty-five thousand sacks of cement on cables strung three hundred feet above the creek — and you understand instantly why it is the most photographed bridge in California. Around Hurricane Point the wind shoulders the car and the suspension declines to be bothered. And this is the trick no mid-engined track weapon can quite manage here: the Z4 keeps you utterly relaxed while you do something genuinely dangerous, hugging the bends — his line, and the right one — like an aunt at a family reunion.
I finally arrive at Nepenthe a place built within the ocean cliff and looking over the Pacific with a better view than God has. Thirty miles south of Carmel a small wooden sign appears on the right, a short climb up from the road, and then a terrace built into the cliff 808 feet above the water — and I will not try to improve on his description of the view. The history is almost indecently good. In May 1944 Orson Welles, in San Francisco selling war bonds and paid for his trouble in rationed petrol coupons, drove this exact coast home to Los Angeles, stopped on a whim, found a little cabin on a hilltop, and bought it that same afternoon as a romantic hideaway for his new wife — the actress and wartime pin-up Rita Hayworth. They measured the windows for curtains and never came back; they were divorced within three years. The Fassett family bought the cabin and its twelve acres and, in 1949, hired Rowan Maiden — a student of Frank Lloyd Wright — to build a restaurant from local redwood and hand-made adobe, wrapped around a living coastal oak and open to the sky. They named it Nepenthe, the word from Homer's Odyssey for the potion that erases sorrow. Henry Miller drank here. So did Anaïs Nin, Steve McQueen, Kim Novak. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton danced on this very terrace in The Sandpiper in 1965. Nepenthe was a hangout for Hollywood legends and elites back in the 60's, and the building has been quietly collecting that kind of evening ever since.
With its massive open fireplace as you walk on to its premises that invites you immediately to sit and spark up a conversation, to the wrap around deck, you immediately feel like you found Elysium and want to tell people and at the same time keep it a hidden gem. The old oak at the centre of the terrace is gone now — it died in the 1970s — but in its place a sculptor named Edmund Kara carved a five-foot phoenix rising straight out of the dead trunk, bronze-footed, and it has been Nepenthe's emblem ever since: the thing reborn from the thing that died, which is either a coincidence or the most on-the-nose symbol in the state of California. The open fire pulls strangers into a loose circle around it. The wrap-around deck hangs out over fifty miles of coastline. Birds drop down and steal fries straight off your plate. And that instinct of his — to want to tell everyone about the place and to keep it a secret in the very same breath — is precisely the feeling Nepenthe has been handing people for seventy-five years. You found Elysium. You will tell three people, and swear all three to silence.
While having their famous ambrosia burger and a beer looking about into the abyss of the Pacific Ocean I reflected on my drive down going over turns, bends, scenery, subtle races I had with other cars on the way down and came to the realization that BMW hit the mark no one else saw. There is an Ambrosia Burger — ground steak, a sauce the family has guarded since 1949, on a soft French roll — and a cold beer, and the whole blue abyss of the Pacific opening out below the rail, and after a drive like the one behind you it is impossible not to sit and take the entire thing apart in your head. The corners. The bridges. The light. The two or three entirely unofficial races with strangers who wanted to play. And the place your mind keeps landing is the thing the whole car turns out to be about.
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1844)As the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it — in a line about art that turns out to describe product planning just as well — talent hits a target no one else can hit, and genius hits a target no one else can even see. Every journalist and every buyer in 2009 could see the target the Boxster was aiming at: the sharper sports car, the quicker lap, the better tool. Porsche hit it, brilliantly, dead centre. That is talent, and there is no shame in it. But BMW was aiming somewhere else entirely, at something most of the industry could not even make out — not the fastest two-seater, but the finest companion, a roadster built so that the journey, and never the stopwatch, would be the whole point. And I believe BMW did that here with the Z4.
And this is why the car matters more with every year that slides past. It is being engineered out of existence — not the Z4 by name, but the whole idea of it. The industry is optimising. Everything new is more efficient, more aerodynamic, more sensible, more screen and more app and more crossover — and in the same motion, quietly, less art. There was a time a car was allowed to be a beautiful, faintly impractical, emotionally indulgent object and to justify itself on those grounds alone. The Z4 35is is one of the last that was — built right at the lip of the cliff, in the final moment before the road turned inland for good. The more the new ones harden into appliances, the more obvious it becomes what the Z4 always quietly was: not transportation, but one of those targets only a genius was ever aiming at — and an instant classic the rest of us are only now, a decade late, finally learning to see.
The Porsche Boxster was the benchmark of its era. Technically superior in certain measurable ways — mid-engine balance, cornering precision, driver communication through the chassis. It sold in far greater numbers, earned far more press coverage, and by the conventional measures of the sports car market it was the correct choice. If you wanted the sharper tool, the faster lap, the car that motoring journalists in 2012 unanimously agreed was the one to have, you bought a Boxster. That was correct. And it was also, in the way that correct choices sometimes are, a choice that came with consequences nobody was forecasting.
The Boxster's success created its own problem. When enough people buy the same car, the car stops being special. It stops being a statement and starts being a demographic. The sports car market has always understood this on some level — it's why limited editions command premiums, why low-volume variants are sought after, why rarity is as much a part of value as performance. The 981 Boxster of the same era is a fine car today by any objective measure. It is also everywhere. In a certain kind of well-to-do suburb, in a certain kind of car park outside a certain kind of restaurant, it is the expected vehicle — and when a car becomes expected, it has given up the most valuable thing a sports car can possess.
The Z4 35is went the other direction. It was sold in limited allocation. It was bought by people who had done the research, who had sought it out, who understood the difference between the standard car and this one. It never accumulated the kind of volume that breeds ubiquity. A decade on, the people who own them know what they have. They are not selling them. They are watching the convertible disappear from the new car market — manufacturers axing open-top models with an urgency that suggests the segment has been formally declared uneconomical — and they are understanding, with increasing clarity, what that means for the surviving examples of the last great naturally roofed, twin-turbocharged, driver-focused BMW roadster.
Here is something that does not happen often with cars designed to be modern and performance-focused: the Z4 sDrive35is is more beautiful now than it was the day it was new. Not because it has been restored or preserved or treated with special reverence. Because time has clarified what it was doing. The kidney grilles integrated into the nose rather than floating free. The shoulder line that traces its unbroken arc with the patience of something that doesn't need to announce itself. The long bonnet that encourages your eye to follow it all the way to the tail, which arrives with a muscular authority that rewards anyone who bothered to walk around the car. The proportions are correct in a way that is timeless precisely because they are not fashionable — they follow a logic that goes back to the 315/1 in 1934, the same fundamental geometry of a proper roadster.
The retractable hardtop — controversial when new because purists felt it added weight and the soft top was the more elegant solution — has proven its worth with the passing years. Structurally it tightens the car. The body feels more buttoned-down than the soft-top alternatives of the period. With the roof up, the Z4 35is is a proper, all-weather grand tourer with a quality of cabin refinement that the Boxster of the same era, for all its dynamic superiority, could not match. You do not shout on the motorway. You listen to the straight-six at cruise and think about where you are going and why this was the right way to get there.
This is the fact that changes everything: the open-top two-seat roadster is becoming extinct. Not slowly, not gradually, but with the purposeful urgency of an industry that has made its decision and is executing it. Mazda's MX-5 survives, bless it, as a smaller and more affordable proposition. The current Z4 continues, for now. But manufacturers are cutting convertibles and roadsters from their lineups at a pace that suggests the segment has been formally reclassified as uneconomical. The electrification transition is accelerating this — a heavy battery pack and a light, low-slung open-top car are fundamentally incompatible propositions, and nobody has yet solved the equation. The cars that replaced the classic roadster format are crossovers with sunroofs, and that is not the same thing and never will be.
Against that backdrop, the Z4 sDrive35is is not just a good car. It is a finite object. A twin-turbocharged, naturally-aspirated-in-character, rear-wheel-drive, open-top two-seater from the last era in which such things were made in abundance and bought by people who still thought they would always be available. The people who own them now know what they have. They know that the roadster community is not growing — it is consolidating around the cars that got it right. And the Z4 35is got it right in a way that becomes more obvious with every passing year and every new crossover that arrives to replace something nobody asked to replace.
There are journeys that deserve a coastline road. There are mornings that deserve a canyon run before breakfast. There are evenings that deserve a back road through New England in October, when the leaves are doing what October leaves do and the twin-turbo six is doing what twin-turbo sixes do, and the roof is where it should be when the sky looks like that. The Z4 35is is the correct vehicle for all of those journeys. It always was. The market is arriving at that conclusion on its own schedule, and in automotive terms, that schedule is called appreciation.
The collector car market has a pattern so consistent it reads as law: the cars that were overlooked during their production run become the ones most desired afterward. The BMW 507 sold 254 units and nearly bankrupted the company. Today it is the most valuable BMW ever produced. The Allroad 2.7T was dismissed as unreliable and depreciated into irrelevance. Now the community that never stopped believing in it watches values recover and understands they were always right. The Z4 35is is at an earlier point on that curve — but it is on that curve, and the trajectory is clear to anyone who cares to look.
What you are buying for $20,000-$35,000 is a twin-turbocharged grand touring roadster from the era in which BMW still built cars that drove with genuine character. A car that was praised by every serious reviewer who gave it real attention — Evo, Winding Road, BimmerFile — while being systematically undersold by a public that bought Boxsters because the consensus said to. A car with a heritage line that runs directly from the 1934 Berlin Motor Show to a California canyon road on a Tuesday morning. A car whose styling gets better every year it ages. And a car whose format — the pure, two-seat, open-top, rear-wheel-drive roadster — is actively disappearing from the new car market at a rate that makes every surviving example more significant by the month.
The people who have them know. The people who don't are beginning to figure it out. This is what a hidden gem looks like at the moment before it isn't hidden anymore.
The BMW Z4 sDrive35is is the heir to ninety years of BMW roadster DNA — the 315/1's six-cylinder heart, the 507's restraint and proportion, the hunger for the open road that no amount of crossover practicality has ever replaced. It is faster than the Boxster it was compared to. It has aged better than anything it competed against. It was built in numbers small enough that the people who own one understand they have something most people drove past without recognising. The roadster is going away. The convertible itself is going away. The twin-turbocharged, rear-wheel-drive, naturally-roofed expression of driving joy that the Z4 35is represents is going away. What remains are the cars that got it right while the format still existed. The Z4 35is got it right.
The shortest route is rarely the most enjoyable one. The Z4 35is has always known this. Drive one and you will know it too — for every remaining mile that the roof-down world still exists, and for all the miles after that when the memory of it will have to be enough.
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