Alpina D3 S 2023 long-term test
Want a fast 3 Series estate with a straight-six diesel? We did too, of course, so here it is
*Why we’re running it: * To see if a fast estate is still the best car in the world
-Month 3 - Month 2 - Month 1 - Specs-
-Life with an Alpina D3 S: Month 3-
*Who needs Italy when you have North Wales and a car like this? - 9 August*
Another week, another adventure for the beast from Buchloe. My poor colleague Matt Prior, the car’s official keeper, can’t have actually spent much time with it so far. Pretty much every member of the Autocar office has stolen it away at one point or another, returning a week later with a grin on their face and another 1000 or so miles on the odometer. Sorry, Matt.
As you may recall, Richard Lane treated the D3 S to a lovely summer holiday a few weeks ago. The sun-kissed mountains of Italy awaited him, accessed by mile after mile of French autoroute so smooth that it makes the back of my laptop look like a gravel trap. I decided that this was far too easy, so I decided to take the D3 S to North Wales, a land full of very bumpy roads and probably enough rain every year to warrant building an ark.
Lane suggested that this might just be the best car on the planet in real-world conditions – very high praise indeed – but that was on the wide and well-paved roads of mainland Europe. Could it retain that moniker on the narrow, pothole-strewn lanes of Cymru?
I don’t know why I ever doubted him. It felt completely at home wherever I took it, from the two-lane ribbons of Tarmac in the highlands of Eryri to the single-track passes of the Elan Valley. I was shocked at how easy it was to place – thanks in part to the fantastic feedback from the steering – and it never felt too large for the fairly narrow roads. I took a Ford Focus ST on a similar tour earlier this year and, if anything, the D3 S felt more appropriate for it.
It builds your confidence incredibly quickly, holding your hand in Sport mode to encourage you to go faster, even in utterly rotten conditions. You really wouldn’t guess that it’s a 1900kg car, thanks to Alpina’s expertly judged reworking of BMW’s xDrive system to split torque in a more playful manner and the suspension adjustments, which make bumps and holes all but disappear. It’s so accessible, yet so brutally fast.
It just puts a grin on your face. I found a set of tight sweepers that flowed over a pair of fairly substantial crests before dropping you down into a high-speed left-hander and I ended up taking several runs at them, marvelling every time at the inch-perfect turn-in response, brakes that feel like they could stop a train and, of course, the ballistic acceleration.
What impressed me most of all, though, was how despite all this, it revealed itself to be absolutely uncompromised when I travelled back from Wales and started to commute in it. Stick it in Comfort mode and it’ll make mincemeat of any motorway you throw at it. I tend to get quite tired and annoyed after being on the road for long periods of time, but after a trip from Dorset to Norfolk and back in a day, I felt as fresh as ever when I rolled back onto my driveway 500 miles later. The D3 S relaxes you like few other cars can.
Is there another one out there that does all this and can also swallow an entire drum kit? I doubt it. What a machine.
*Like it*
*Easy to drive fast*
For such a devastatingly quick car, it’s so accessible. Suspension, steering and torque-vectoring tweaks make it easy to unleash your inner Roberto Ravaglia.
*Multi-storey stress*
Huge wheels seem to protrude from the tyres, making tight car parks incredibly stressful. The black finish doesn’t do the fantastic design justice either.
*Mileage: *8008
*Back to the top*
-Life with an Alpina D3 S: Month 2-
*We let our continent-crushing, ’bahnstorming executive express do what it does best - 12 July *
As I pass broad asphalted and concreted roadside truck parks that used to host the border posts between Belgium and Germany, a blue sign tells me I’ve changed countries and a black and white circle says the speed limit has been adjusted to... well, whatever I think is sensible today.
Roads like this have become a large part of the appeal of Alpinas like this D3 S Touring. There are owners “who will use a car rather than plane to go from Munich to Frankfurt”, I was told last year by Andreas Bovensiepen, who, with his brother Florian, has been running the company their father founded to tune BMWs in 1965.
So I do the polite thing and put my foot in, leave it there and feel the speed build and build.
Despite the current trend away from big diesels, I still find their generosity of in-gear acceleration really impressive, more so than the 4.6sec 0-62mph standing-start acceleration time suggests. It still builds confidently well into three figures and it’s not long before I’m quickly glancing down at the instruments, then looking way into the distance for traffic, as it heads above 150mph. Then I see a car or truck, back off and do the whole thing again.
The D3 S apparently tops out at 170mph. I didn’t see that many numbers on the dial but noted an indicated 160mph-plus a couple of times. The brakes are iron rather than carbon-ceramic, but they feel well up to repeated stops. At those sorts of speeds, there’s plenty of air going to them. The required pedal pressures are big, but then there’s a lot of momentum to haul down too. Stability is outstanding and the steering totally steady.
Derestricted autobahns are one of the reasons that powerful German-developed cars feel like they often do. And I don’t think it’s a surprise that cars develop character traits based on where they’re developed – our poor-conditioned roads around small fields are why British cars so often have good ride and steering.
But it’s a treat to take a car to where it’s really in its element. If I had to cross large parts of Germany regularly on business, I think it would be hard to beat a car like this, for the reasons why it’s often difficult to beat the car in general: trains don’t necessarily go when and where you want and ditto aeroplanes. A one-hour flight is at least a three-hour faff involving taking your belt off. And for people like us, driving is good fun. The appeal is undimmed.
Still, ultimately it’s harder to find completely clear bits of autobahn these days and there are sections with variable speed limits, with 130kph (81mph) indicated at busier times. At which speeds it’s still easy to make good progress. On derestricted sections, I settled into a cruise at around 100mph, where the revs were maintained low and I didn’t need to work the throttle, brakes or my concentration quite so hard. And at which speed the Alpina is more inclined to return its naturally easy economy.
It’s hard to get a true bearing on how much fuel high-speed running uses, because it’s so variable, but if all you’re doing is sitting at modest (for German autobahn) speeds, you can expect MPG to be in the high 40s. And it doesn’t take long to fill it.
However, an apology, because I sold you a pup in this car’s first report, saying that BMW UK no longer offers a 3 Series Touring with this big diesel engine fitted to it. My error – sorry. I searched BMW’s online configurator for it and thought it was gone, but the 3.0 is in a section marked under ‘M models’, which I took to only mean the M3, rather than the M340d xDrive – ridiculously daft of me, given that I think I’ve driven one within the past year.
*Like it*
*Raise your glass*
The tailgate has a glass hatch that opens onto the boot without the whole bootlid having to open.
*Loathe it*
*Black mark*
I don’t think I’d spec a black finish on the wheels, which pick up brake dust more notably than silver ones
*Mileage: *3405
*Back to the top*
*The D3 S is a welcoming sight when jetlagged - 5 July*
In an airport car park at 1:15am, with a two-hour drive home, assuming they haven’t shut any motorways (oh, they have), I will contend there are few better sights than an Alpina D3 S with 250 miles still left in its tank. Responsive enough to keep you awake, refined enough to soothe the miles. It’s the perfect blend of comfort and agility – and you’ll beat the sat-nav’s ETA.
*Mileage:* 2602
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-Life with an Alpina D3 S: Month 1-
*Welcoming the Alpina to the fleet - 21 June 2023*
Time is running out for independent-era Alpinas like this, the D3 S Touring, which is based on the latest-generation BMW 3 Series and has joined Autocar for the next few months. Goody.
Alpina was bought by BMW last spring but will continue with its own line-up of models (although they are largely finished on BMW production lines) until 2025. After that, BMW will be in control of new Alpina output.
Hopefully, they will continue being things like this. A fast 3 Series wagon is perennially the sort of car that migrates to the top of those ‘all the car you’ll ever need’ lists, and the D3 S is the right sort of fast 3 Series wagon.
The D3 diesel – and its B3 petrol alternative – were revised last year when BMW facelifted the 3 Series range. The result is a 355bhp and, importantly, 539lb ft estate with a 48V mild-hybrid system.
Because Alpina is rated as a tiny manufacturer and so has less pressure on its corporate average fuel consumption than a large car maker, it can sell a car with this 3.0-litre straight-six diesel engine in the UK, while BMW itself sadly no longer does.
It officially returns 40.9mpg and 182g/km, and while doing so is a car with a 4.6sec 0-62mph time and a 170mph top speed. Alpina buyers in Germany love that kind of flexibility – and for not unrelated reasons, it’s one of the first places I took the D3 S (more on which next time).
In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the basics. The D3 S costs £66,000 and is respectably equipped off the bat, but you can add a lot of options. There’s a full list of what this car contains on the opposite page, but the important extras are the 20in black forged wheels, instead of 19s, black paint against which it’s hard to see the subtle decal kit and high-performance brakes. Inside is a Harman Kardon hi-fi and merino leather trim (it’s part blue but you can have white, red, brown or black). I’ll go into the others later.
First impressions are good. This shouldn’t be a surprise: a 3 Series is good and Alpina does good work, so an Alpina 3 Series should be terrific. And it is. I know diesels get flak to the extent that they took barely over 5% of new car sales last year, but the BMW 3.0-litre has always been a peach and with the 48V mild-hybrid system start-stopping it in an instant without shaking, the eight-speed ZF transmission remaining one of the finest in the business and the xDrive four-wheel drive system, it’s proving to be a seamless, effortless, 550-mile-to-a-tank and 50mpg-without-trying-too-hard (I’m still settling to an average) mile eater.
The diesel has lost out to the plug-in hybrid in particular (thanks in great part to the company car tax benefits), but you would have to plug one in a lot to match the D3 S’s economy. In jobs like mine, with lots of long journeys to places where I can’t plug in on location, it’s still incredibly useful.
Apparently, those high-speed, high-mile journeys play a big part in the popularity of Alpina’s diesel models in Germany (people will commute big distances rather than fly internally), while in Japan, traditionally a petrol rather than a diesel market, they think of them as we did in the early 2000s too.
Dynamically, it’s impressive. Firm, certainly, but brilliantly controlled, with relatively low noise levels, consistent if heavy steering – brutally stable at high speeds – and just a reliable, unflinching way of going about things.
It’s usually tempting to compare an Alpina with its equivalent BMW M car, but that this is a diesel and BMW itself doesn’t offer this engine means I won’t make the M3 Touring comparison. I think they are really quite different cars – the D3 S doesn’t have M levels of agility.
If it does have an issue, it’s not really all of its own making. Those 20in wheels wear 30-profile Pirelli P Zero tyres front and rear, closely matched at 255mm (front) and 265mm (rear) wide, which should make this four-wheel-drive car with even weight distribution very nicely balanced.
But twice in the past week I’ve thought I was going to rip a tyre from the rim over some very British potholes that I didn’t see at night. A proper thump of the sort that makes you think you’re going to spend the next two hours waiting for a recovery truck. It’s almost tempting to recommend the 19s instead, but they have a split five-spoke design rather than these slinkier Alpina classic spokes for which, even in black, I’m a bit of a sucker.
Anyway, more next time – including whether continental Europe is kinder to the rubber.
*Second Opinion*
Prior is right to feel like the cat that got the creamy diesel V6. Alpina’s D4 S Gran Coupé sister car impressed the hell out of me earlier this year with its incredible cruising refinement and long-striding easy performance and efficiency. I remember thinking that you could probably get 40mpg out of one at 100mph-plus autobahn speeds.
*Matt Saunders*
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-Alpina D3 S Touring specification-
*Specs: Price New* £66,000 *Price as tested* £88,265 *Options *20in wheels £3420, Black Sapphire paint £800, decal set £420, performance brakes £1770, carbonfibre interior trim finishers £500, merino leather £3800, comfort access £560, lumbar support £195, electric seat adjust £1120, galvanic finish on controls £95, CNC aluminium gear paddles £290, high-gloss interior £205, panoramic sunroof £1550, laser headlights £1870, shadow line lights £300, driving assistant professional £1870, drive recorder £190, park assistant plus £650, acoustic glazing £190, sun protection glass £380, auto-dim mirrors £310, loudspeaker upgrade £820, electric towbar £960
*Test Data: Engine* 3.0-litre straight-six diesel *Power* 355bhp *Torque* 539lb ft at 4200rpm *Kerb weight* 1950kg *Top speed* 168mph *0-62mph* 4.6sec *Fuel economy* 40.9mpg (claimed) *CO2* xxxg/km *Faults* None *Expenses* None
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