This B58-Swapped BMW E46 Touring Is The Fast Wagon Of Our Dreams

Imagine for a second you’ve just picked up a fairly basic E46 BMW 3-series and you’re looking to swap in a new engine. What are you picking? An LS swap would be a fairly obvious choice, or you could keep it in the family with an S54 from the M3. Maybe though, you’re feeling brave enough to drop a new B58 in there.

That’s exactly what NV Motorsport UK has done with its latest build. Starting with a basic E46 Touring, it’s managed to successfully stuff the turbocharged 3.0-litre straight-six into the engine bay - and get it running, too.

NV claims this to be the first time the swap has been done. An impressive feat, but as a result it’s meant no previous support to rely on.

We’ve been following NV’s build along the way, so we’re very excited to see that the car, dubbed ‘Silver Surfer’, is now finished. Some 20 months after it was picked up as a fairly tired £1000 318i Touring, it’s been given a complete overhaul, and one not without its headaches.

Most of these, unsurprisingly, revolved around trying to get the B58 engine, taken from a wrecked M140i, into the Touring. It was squeezed in with the help of some custom engine mounts, but the biggest challenge for NV was getting the modern engine’s ECU to talk to the E46’s ’90s-spec wiring harness.

Finishing off the build is a set of forged Titan T-R10 wheels and a set of massive Tarox brakes with eight-piston callipers up front and six-piston items on the rear. It’s all topped off with a series of body mods.

With the car complete, NV’s plan is to get the Silver Surfer on a dyno and see just how much power it can extract from the B58, with 1000bhp the end goal. After that? A trip to the Nürburgring, naturally. Oh, and better yet, NV said in a previous video that it’s “highly likely” it’ll offer this as a swap kit to customers in the future.