You Can Now Buy A Handsome E89 BMW Z4 For As Little As £8000

Last month, we welcomed a new addition to the CT office garage: a tidy E89 BMW Z4 35i owned by Gabz. Yep, the guy we like to poke fun at for selling good cars and replacing them with VW Polos (seriously, he’s done it twice) now has a wicked twin-turbo, inline-six-powered roadster that’s damn near impossible to mock.

Granted, the E89 is more of a cruiser than an out-and-out sports car, but so long as you accept this, the second-gen Z4 is a tempting used buy. Particularly now prices of the earliest models are starting to dip below £8000.

That kind of money will bag you a 23i with a 2.5-litre inline-six, but if you want some reasonable straight-line performance, examples of the 30i and 35i start at just over £10,000. There’s little difference in values between the two, so it’d be a smart move to opt for the 35i, particularly given the tuning potential of that twin-turbo ‘N54’ engine. But, we thought we’d pluck this 30i out of the classifieds, as the earlier ‘N52’ N/A straight-six has its own appeal.

You’re looking at 254bhp from the 3.0-litre stuffed in the E89’s curvaceous front-end, allowing for a 0-60mph time under six seconds. Sure, the 35i manages the benchmark sprint closer to the five second mark than the six, but the superior soundtrack has to be worth a little sacrifice in performance, right?

Our classifieds pick is also one of the few 30i manuals out there, and while it weighs in at a reasonably hefty £14,000, it’s only clocked 25,000 miles. The advert states that the car has a full service history, but little else - there’s a frustrating lack of detail here, but a reasonable set of pictures to inspect, at least.

Would you be tempted to have a Z4 30i over the 35i? Or would your £14k go elsewhere? To the comments section!