Any Self-Respecting BMW Fanboy Needs To Own An 8-Series Like This

As you may have seen, BMW’s gorgeous E31 8-series turned 25 this week. We signed off our ode to this classy GT car by pointing out that they can be picked up for very little. With that in mind, we’ve been searching for the 8-series we’d buy ourselves, and stumbled upon this beauty.

It’s the earlier 4.0-litre M60 V8 rather than the later, more economical M62 4.4-litre V8, but you still get the same amount of power: a useful 286bhp. Thanks to the sheer weight of the car and the old-school, slow-witted automatic gearbox (manuals are extremely rare), 0-62mph is dispatched in a rather relaxed 7.4 seconds. But these cars are all about cruising, rather than belting performance, something the 840 Ci is perfect for.

At £5990 it’s reasonably priced; it’s got only 73,687 miles on the clock and looks absolutely mint too. Running one isn’t ever going to be cheap; aside from the obvious high fuel and servicing costs, there are a lot of electrical bits and pieces that can - and often do - go expensively wrong in an 8-series. So is it really worth the financial headaches? Hell yes.