Noticed today that my question has been partially answered in this thread - seems there were 103 Z4MC's originally exported to Australia.Siener2 wrote:This subject fascinates me. The site BMW M Registry gives the following production numbers for the M Coupe:
"How many versions of the E86 M Coupe were produced?
BMW M offered three distinct versions of the E86 M Coupe: European-spec models in both left-hand drive and right-hand drive configurations, plus a single North American-spec version.
How many of each version were produced?
ECE (LHD): 1,652 produced from 4/06 through 7/08 (Plus 65 pre-production examples produced 10/05 through 3/06)
ECE (RHD): 1,054 produced from 4/06 through 6/08 (Plus 1 pre-production example produced 2/06)
NA (LHD): 1,801 produced from 4/06 through 8/08 (Plus 14 pre-production examples produced 10/05 through 4/06)"
Note that the above production numbers come to 4507 worldwide, which is 232 more than the 4275 number usually quoted (and that currently appears on Wikipedia without a proper reference). The North American figure on BMW M Registry is only 14 lower than the Wikipedia number.
If the info Superbow got from BMW UK (see previous page) is correct, then there are (1054-578)= 476 RHD M Coupes outside the UK. These should mostly be in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Japan. I therefore emailed an enquiry to BMW South Africa and received a very friendly phone call in reply today. According to BMW SA, a total of 206 M Coupes and only 95 M Roadsters landed up in this country. Which means the Antipodeans, Japan and everyone else must have shared the remaining (476-206)=270 M Coupes.
To the forum members in Australia and New Zealand - your cars are even rarer than in the rest of the world. I would love to get accurate figures though, so see what you can find out.
The 1054 right hand drive M Coupes were therefore distributed as follows:
UK = 578
South Africa = 206
Australia = 103
New Zealand, Japan and everybody else driving on the left hand side of the road =167
Any Kiwi's on here who are willing to get the equivalent info from BMW New Zealand? Or are you all too busy watching the RWC?