Z4-forum.com

Every dozen or so pages this thread recycles old debates.

If you're looking to the Z4MR or Z4MC as a potential alternative for more modern machinery that you might want to buy you won't be able to justify the price they fetch now or in the future. But, if you are buying the car because of what it represents in terms of the motoring history of a brand or era, as an increasing number of people have been, the values make a lot more sense. Same goes for the M Coupe (Z3). We're in uncharted waters - the type of car that the Z4M's is, is gone, finished, done, never to return, so they will become historically interesting (more so than some cars, less than others) to many people. They'll steadily increase in value over the years IF they are well preserved and maintained with a good history. To some extent the mileage is unimportant if the car has had all the important maintenance tasks done that it's mileage would warrant (for example bearing shells, vanos, inspection II, shim replacements, suspension refreshes etc.)

original guvnor wrote: ↑Tue Oct 31, 2017 7:37 pm a lot of sense

It will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future. Closing in on 4 years of ownership and I genuinely don't see me selling mine ever really. So, to me the market's valuation of what my car may or may not be worth is a bit of a mute point and no doubt similarly for a number of other owners.
That said, to replace the car with something significantly better right now would require a large amount of cash, which I think most would agree upon (excepting 35i owners of course ). Looking at it from that point of view I think the value in these cars at the moment is clear.
I'll check in on the thread in a couple of years, see where we're at

Angelus666 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 31, 2017 1:03 pm This forum is very strange at times. We really do a bad job of talking up the value of our cars. To think you can get a Z4MC for nearly £15k in 2017 is an amazing bargain compared to what other cars are going for. A 2009 C2S 911 is still £42k+, even a Cayman is another £20k+ for a good one.

I do wonder why is the Z4MC valued so highly in certain parts of the world, but relatively low here....?

wheres the clap emoji..... read back a good few pages and i made some similar comments.

Beedub wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:06 pm

Angelus666 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 31, 2017 1:03 pm This forum is very strange at times. We really do a bad job of talking up the value of our cars. To think you can get a Z4MC for nearly £15k in 2017 is an amazing bargain compared to what other cars are going for. A 2009 C2S 911 is still £42k+, even a Cayman is another £20k+ for a good one.

I do wonder why is the Z4MC valued so highly in certain parts of the world, but relatively low here....?

wheres the clap emoji..... read back a good few pages and i made some similar comments.

Yeah, I've found it odd that a z4 owners forum seems to constantly write down the value of our cars.

Last M division, s54, manual gearbox car from BMW. They are bargains at current prices. Imo.

It isn’t the first time or last this topic has been discussed At the end of the day you can talk them up or down as much as you like and over inflate sale prices yet people will only pay what they think is a fair price

Muckinonthesofa wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:14 pm

Beedub wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2017 7:06 pm

Angelus666 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 31, 2017 1:03 pm This forum is very strange at times. We really do a bad job of talking up the value of our cars. To think you can get a Z4MC for nearly £15k in 2017 is an amazing bargain compared to what other cars are going for. A 2009 C2S 911 is still £42k+, even a Cayman is another £20k+ for a good one.

I do wonder why is the Z4MC valued so highly in certain parts of the world, but relatively low here....?

wheres the clap emoji..... read back a good few pages and i made some similar comments.

Yeah, I've found it odd that a z4 owners forum seems to constantly write down the value of our cars.

Last M division, s54, manual gearbox car from BMW. They are bargains at current prices. Imo.

It isn't just this forum. I've been a member on many special interest car forums over the years for various models and makes. Its always the same and as you say quite surprising how members seemingly 'talk-down' their own model of car.

I put this down to a false machismo. A false display that they are the "best hunters within the pack"; that they really are top experts and hence know how to get their quarry at the best price.

I can think of examples from when I used to pursue my hobby of restoring older BMWs and Mercs where such "experts" on specialist forums would quote values for some of the cars I'd done only for me to actually end up selling them for up to eight times more!

I agree with you that at the moment these cars are complete bargains at the prices that they sell for.

Is it groundhog day
There will always be owners getting in at the bottom , middle or top floor then find the lift moving up or down in the meantime some will use them a little , some a lot some will keep them a while , some will keep them for just a season , guess it depends why the car was purchased
Investment ?
Enjoyment of ?
Enjoyment of simply owning ?
A means of A-B ?

What i do know is after over 5 years here i fail to see any tangible proof that what gets discussed on this forum affects the wider marketplace with any significance

mr wilks wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2017 9:35 pm
What i do know is after over 5 years here i fail to see any tangible proof that what gets discussed on this forum affects the wider marketplace with any significance

Yes, that'll definitely be the truth. This forum won't make a blind bit of difference to values.

What will make a difference is if a few motoring journos, sites like PH and certain dealers start latching on and 'hyping' them. If that happens then, depending how long they can remain in the spot-light as the 'thing to have', we'll see a big hike in prices because they are ever so low at present.

When I sold my E30 M3 I sold it for £13.5K which at the time was just about the highest I'd seen a Non-Evo Sport go for. 'Experts' on forums reckoned my car was worth "...up to £10K." My friend sold his M3 Evo II for £4.5K. Within months EVO Magazine did an article declaring them the greatest M-car of all...a highly, highly dubious accolade. Prices went through the roof! The cars hadn't suddenly got any better or rarer in those months and, as you say, nothing to do with what was being said on forums.

http://www.bmwclassics.co.uk/gallery/in ... Gal=E30_M3

I take that in,but i think rather than magazine features its more of a cyclic thing with cars..

Interest rates are low,no point in putting money anywhere but in car stock... Big money gets loaded in and they dictate pricing.

I seen it happen with E types years ago,they went through the roof and with my place of work being a Jaguar resto specialist at the time we invested heavily..Within 12 months the economy had changed and the arse fell out of the market,dropping the price of E types and Mk2's dramatically..Of course with the passage of time things have rebounded again and prices are on the up for "anything classic"...

Escorts and any fast retro Ford were the flavour over the last few years,but things have stalled over the last 6 months.. My friend has a unit full of stuff he cant get rid of,he could sell it cheap but he paid half decent money to get in and wants a return... Its looking unlikely that he will come out massively in front..



Anything with an M,RS,AMG etc etc are always going to be collectable,the skill is getting in and getting out at the right time.

I bought my M coupe for £12k, owned it twice and over the 2 deals made me nearly £6000,i was very lucky. The guy that paid £16500 for it and sold it 18 months later for £12,000 didnt feel like he had a good investment..

Its about where you place yourself..Timing is everything

The reasons I think, predict...and hope...this will happen with Z4Ms are based on precedent and are as follows:

Any car/model where this is likely to happen needs to fulfil certain criteria.

Firstly, it needs to be rare but not vanishingly so. Rare because it makes it desirable but it mustn't be too rare otherwise it's not worth hyping because there aren't enough units to make it worthwhile to dealers who want to make their money time and time over.

Examples from my own past experience that fit that criterion would be the E30 M3, as already mentioned above, but also things like the Mercedes SL Pagoda. Both are rare-ish but by no stretch of the imagination vanishingly so. IIRC E30 M3s were produced to the tune of over 17,000 units. Mercedes Pagodas were produced to the tune of nearly 49,000. Ok, many will have rotted away over time but they are still hardly "very rare".

http://www.bmwclassics.co.uk/gallery/in ... des_Pagoda

So, the Z4M (Roadster or Coupe) certainly tick that box? They're rare (I don't know the exact figures but you guys will) but not vanishingly. But there's more.

Secondly, it needs to be something aesthetically eye-catching. That can be genuinely beautiful or even just quirky or standout. One assumes that most of us here like the E85/E86 styling? But, many people don't! It doesn't really matter. What is undeniable is that they have a distinctive, standout look. Most people don't buy 'classic cars' for their performance figures alone; they buy with their hearts which in-turn are lead by their eyes. My previous two examples also tick that box but I'll offer a further stark example from my archive: The BMW E9 Coupes.

I owned one of these cars for 13 years (1988 -2001). I bought it with some savings plus my first month's salary when I first qualified. At the time you virtually couldn't give them away and for my one owner, 70K mile, manual/carb version CS I paid the princely sum of £1500...mainly because I simply couldn't afford the £3000 that a full-blown CSL would have cost me. Look at them now. Again, a rare-ish car...but not vanishingly so...and with a stand-out styling. I don't have any decent pics on this computer but if anyone wants a blurred view (it was pre-digital camera days) it's the fifth thumbnail from the bottom in this link:

http://www.bmwclassics.co.uk/about/index.html

Thirdly, performance always helps. Today none of the above would be considered strong performance cars. I got rid of the E30 M3 because it was too flipping slow on the public road! But, in their own day they were all considered fast cars...and when you're a young schoolboy that's what you're interested in! Trouble is, when you're a young schoolboy you can't afford one. You have to wait until those teenage schoolboys have grown up, earned a few quid and can fulfil the dream that they had when they had their noses pressed up against the showroom windows. That's a difficult and imprecise length of time to predict but I would suggest possibly not less than 10-15 years?

There is a further (even to this day) persisting alluring dimension to performance and the 'Need for Speed'.

We still, illogically, hanker and desire the fastest iteration of any model. Hence, take the E46 M3 as an example. That is a car which, let's face it, is far faster than most of us could seriously drive or run out of performance in when driven at full-tilt, even on a race track let alone the public road where the fast majority spend their time?

But, somehow that's not quite enough performance. We think we need the CSL! We need and want it simply because it's the fastest possible of the range. The fact that it's insanely fast, totally unusable for more than a few seconds on a public road doesn't really enter our serious decision making process. It's the fastest E46...so that's what we've got to have and can be led to believe that we're justified in paying a premium many times over the 'next best'. I know this because I did it myself!

I paid £30K for a CSL when, at the time, an equivalent normal-E46 M3 would have been sub-£10K and would still have been a car way faster than I "needed. Once I had realised this, I then really struggled to sell it again for £28K. Again, the usual story played out.a A few months later the usual motoring journos and the usual dealers started casting their evil spell....and we know exactly what happened?

http://www.bmwclassics.co.uk/gallery/in ... l=2003_CSL

So, so far all of the cars above we have:

1) Rarity...but not vanishingly rare
2) Stand-out styling
3) Appeal to schoolboys who've now grown-up a bit and have a few quid
4) Top-of-the-range performance....doesn't matter whether that's actually too slow or stupidly fast

Hmmm....what car does that remind you of?

Z4M-2006 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 02, 2017 11:16 am I take that in,but i think rather than magazine features its more of a cyclic thing with cars..

Interest rates are low,no point in putting money anywhere but in car stock... Big money gets loaded in and they dictate pricing.

I seen it happen with E types years ago,they went through the roof and with my place of work being a Jaguar resto specialist at the time we invested heavily..Within 12 months the economy had changed and the arse fell out of the market,dropping the price of E types and Mk2's dramatically..Of course with the passage of time things have rebounded again and prices are on the up for "anything classic"...

Escorts and any fast retro Ford were the flavour over the last few years,but things have stalled over the last 6 months.. My friend has a unit full of stuff he cant get rid of,he could sell it cheap but he paid half decent money to get in and wants a return... Its looking unlikely that he will come out massively in front..



Anything with an M,RS,AMG etc etc are always going to be collectable,the skill is getting in and getting out at the right time.

I bought my M coupe for £12k, owned it twice and over the 2 deals made me nearly £6000,i was very lucky. The guy that paid £16500 for it and sold it 18 months later for £12,000 didnt feel like he had a good investment..

Its about where you place yourself..Timing is everything

It's certainly true about the cyclical thing, the ups and downs of the economy, interests rates etc. But, as you say, it's also about 'fashions' and 'flavours of months'. The example you gave of Escorts and fast 'retro' Fords is very good. But, I would suggest that those fashions are brought on by what people read (in magazines etc) which in-turn are written by journos etc. and so the market is thus very malleable and open to manipulation.

I had a member on this very forum (think he's since sold his Z4M Coupe?) willing to give up his Coupe in favour of an E30 M3 and asking if I had one or could help him to find one! My immediate question was: "Have you ever driven one?" As he hadn't, I questioned why he wanted one...he didn't really have a convincing response And, I counselled him that that being the case he'd almost certainly find himself very disappointed and frustrated with any subsequent comparison after the event!

All good points,

And the magazine thing may very well be true. I dont read them,never have so no influence to me at all. Perhaps im not the best to comment on that side of things.

I myself turned down an E30 M3 for £5000,an Escort twin cam at £1500 and a Jenson Interceptor at £1000..All many moons ago,and with foresight i could have been a wealthy fella.
Indeed i have scrapped Escorts that would now be worth £20,000+...

As said,all M cars will sell.....BMW enthusiasts will always see to that. The brand is and always has been well supported by motoring bods,the only people more "errr passionate" about cars seem to be the Porsche clan.

The other thing is how long you would want to own the car before seeing it increase in value,keep anything long enough and it will go up i suspect.Just garaging it to preserve miles and value,although understandable for investment purposes is a crying shame for an M car IMHO. The ultimate driving machine sat in a garage under a cover through fear of knocking lumps off its value makes me cringe..


What we do have to remember is that BMW M cars of yesteryear were special,very special in some cases...Now they are diluted and the Kudos isnt what it was..
The Z4M is a great car,but its just an E46 in a party frock.It doesnt drive brilliantly,its fun but doesnt excell at anything,An E46 M3 is much more a complete car i would suggest.

At £12-£18k they make complete sense for me...Anymore than that though and the logic starts to fail for me.

One of the rarest M cars the price is only going one way it's as simple as that

The other thing about buying and storing is that components fail as they dry up etc etc, they have to move so by the time its back in tip top your margin has probably gone especially on these cars. Completely pointless.

There was a perfect example of a guy on Chasing Classic Cars where he had a Ferrari 246gt Dino for 35-40 years and lived in Arizona and driven like 5000 miles in that time. His wife had never driven it and from the vid was absolutely gutted and the guy that owned it was smug as a Cheshire cat, that he had one. The car was visually in fairly good condition but mechanically was in really poor shape they spent 50-60k dropping the engine, sorting the suspension and getting it in prime working condition, replacing seals, rubber etc etc

On a really good day a 246 Dino is probably worth 300k at auction who knows.

Obviously the technology in those cars is much more analogue in terms of servicing. The fact is if you leave a car and dont drive youll have to spend money on it anyway. Seems such a backward way of thinking.

For good cars in the 20-30k region seems silly to consider for storage. Then again people like Doug Demuro have predicted cars like the E46 M3 E38 M5 etc will nearly quadruple.

It will be interesting to see if interest rate increase affects the market.

samj89 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 02, 2017 12:26 pm One of the rarest M cars the price is only going one way it's as simple as that

But whether its worth buying one as an enthusiast as an investment is always the question. As a great car to drive then absolutely. They are certainly rising but not exponentially. In another 10 years that may be a completely different situation. Short term cashing is probably not viable, all the cars with high prices sit. People have tried and failed.

Its also that dealers jump on that fact and buy anything they can. People like Hexagon trying to alter the market, if its that expensive there they must be great and worth it right?

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified ... 1eu&page=1

This for example its running in service was done at 8989 miles... Yet they want 23 for it with no negotiation. Its been sitting for months. People arent stupid.

Really hard to find a good car with good service history. As OG says its only going to be worth money if its been looked after properly over its whole life. Early on is just as important as late on.

Its probably not the end of the world and would be fine but pretty hard sell and would be very hard to move on. Could imagine the FS thread on the forum would be an absolute blood bath.

The good ones will always be worth good money. Like Andy says it depends what the cut off is where they turn from being great value to being stupid money for the performance like the E30s have got to. For me theres not much point in owning one other than for nostalgia and they were popular before I was born so wouldnt be on my radar.

The Z4M C on the other hand was my laptop screen saver at school from 2006 onward until I bought one a few years later.

Value isnt always in what you can see, its about how you feel and what your buying into and on that note is worth what someone is willing to pay.