BMW 428i Gran Coupe 2014 Review

Somewhere in the bowels of the marketing, sales and product planning departments of BMW’s Fitz there was a great idea.

There was already the thought circling to move the 3 Series Coupe off in its own direction, complete with its own 4 Series badge. But then there was the idea to turn that into a full product line-up all its own.

So there’s the 4 Series Coupe you’ve already seen. There’s the 4 Series Convertible you’ve already seen. And now there’s this, a 4 Series Gran Coupe five-door liftback.

BMW is confident on this one, largely because the exact same strategy worked pretty well when it created the 6 Series Gran Coupe/Coupe/Convertible range.

On the surface, they have every reason to feel confident, because the 428i Gran Coupe is a beautiful-looking machine. It has the wide rear haunches of the Coupe and the more menacing nose as well, while a roofline far lower than the 3 Series sedan finishes it off.

Oh, there’s more. But the question of where it fits in the BMW range rears its head. If you want a mid-sized BMW five seater with this engine, you can now have a 328i, a 328i Touring, a 328i Gran Turismo or this, and that’s before you get to the X3 or the X4. That’s a lot of fragmentation, even if all the fragments are scattered throughout BMW’s strongest area of the pie chart.

That’s probably why BMW has slotted this version, the 428i, in at $81,000 (with GST and LCT). It’s $11,000 upstream of the 420i version, $8700 more than the 420d (the only diesel version coming here) and you’ll fork out another $28,000 ($109,000) for the extra two cylinders in the 435i Gran Coupe. Yeah, that’s $14,000 per cylinder or $622 per kilowatt.

The Gran Coupe package centres on the 4 Series Coupe’s architecture, which is slightly wider than the standard 3 Series sedan and wagon, and uses a large, liftback tailgate to deliver access to its 480 litres of luggage space.

With frameless doors and sharing the Coupe’s tail lights, the Gran Coupe is an obvious relative, with more in common visually with its two-door twin, even if it’s 112mm longer and has a slightly higher roofline.

Before you go getting all confused about where it sits, though, remember that it’s about 200mm shorter than a 3 Series Gran Turismo and it’s also shorter than the 3 Series Touring.

Like the Coupe, the haunches have been moved sideways so that the front track is 1545mm wide, but the rear juts out to 1594mm, which carries over to an 1825mm overall width.

For a 4738mm car, it’s not that heavy, at least not in 428i trim. The rear-drive machine weighs 1510kg with the force-fed four attached, though you can add 20kg for the eight-speed automatic. All-wheel drive adds 70kg, while the six-cylinder 435i is 1575kg.

The running gear ought to be familiar, because it’s identical to the Coupe. Think: five-link rear suspension, a sophisticated evolution of a MacPherson strut front-end, electro/hydraulic power steering and single-piston disc brakes all round.

The engine is a familiar device, having debuted in the current 3 Series. It has the same power as the 328i, with 180kW from 5000-6500rpm and that’s underwritten by 350Nm from 1250-4800rpm.

Just as it reads on paper, there are no flat spots in the engine’s power delivery and no weak warbles in it. For all that, though, the 2.0-litre four is not a sweet-spinning six, no matter how hard BMW works at the sound tuning of the thing.

It will stretch out beyond 7000rpm, just, but not with any real intent or point. It just does. And banging it up through the gears isn’t exactly like being a conductor in charge of an orchestra. It sounds flat, but smooth enough, until it reaches around 5000rpm, then a sound begins, like two metallic tins being torn apart, that just becomes louder. And it repeats over and over, with each full-rev shift.

BMW claims it will reach 100km/h in 6.0 seconds and hit an electronically limited 250km/h. That feels about right, but the oddly artificial noise that accompanies hard work means it feels a little flatter than that. It chimes in, too, for a 6.4L/100km figure for the NEDC cycle, though you can pull that back to 4.6 with the 420d version.

The best part of the car, actually, is the transmission. The eight-speeder is a delight. It’s fast to shift, smooth when you want it to be, blisteringly quick with an accompanying thump in Sport mode and a fast-acting companion at all times. Just as well, because we hear that the nine-speed auto replacement has hit a hitch in its development…

It’s a fast-enough conveyance, provided you appreciate that it’s not quite a sports car and doesn’t even approach the sporting prowess of the Coupe.

That’s odd, because it shares all of its mechanicals with the Coupe, with the exception of the slightly higher rear roll centre due to the liftback hinges.

That’s until you talk to the product-marketing guys, who explain they wanted a car that was sort of between the 3 Series sedan and the 4 Series Coupe in its driving feel, but trending a little more towards the Coupe.

It’s about right, too, though it’s still more of an open-road cruiser than a hairpin hustler. The ride is firmer than the 328i, but it has a slightly disconcerting lack of enthusiasm in the front-end when you push harder in corners. It’s like it takes a lot more input than you expect, then it demands another input somewhere in the corner, even if you’ve sized it all up with a surveyor before you turn in.

It’s a lot worse in the Comfort setting, because the 428i Gran Coupe then feels like it has no self-centring in the steering at all and just meanders all over the place. It’s best to leave it in Sport, because the ride won’t suffer demonstrably from it. The only hiccup will be that it stays a gear lower than you would otherwise get. Or you could leave it in manual mode and make sure it’s in the right gear. Or you could customise it with an Individual setting.

Oh, and dump the skid control system ASAP, because its regular intrusiveness is aggravated by the front-end’s unwillingness to bite as hard as you want. That might be different in Australia, because the 19-inch wheels will be standard on the 428i Gran Coupe here and we were on the 18-inch rubber, which ought to help.

The interior is an interesting place to be, with the front seats a full reflection of what you’d get in the 428i Coupe, while the rears are all new. There’s the full professional satellite navigation system standard for Australia, with the multi-media screen jutting up proudly and slightly out of kilter with the rest of the curved dash, and cruise control with emergency braking, lane departure warnings and camera monitoring are standard.

There is stuff that’s standard in the base 420i that was cost-up optional in the 320i, including the Sport Line trim package that sets you back $3152 in a 320i, 18-inch alloys are standard, leather seats and bi-xenon headlights are standard, a reversing camera is standard and it also has the automatic tailgate as standard gear. The 428i ups this with a nine-speaker sound system and electric lumbar adjustment.

There, you’ll find the enormously thick B-pillar intruding on your lateral vision and the seat base is very short and not terribly supportive of your thighs. And there’s not a lot of space beneath the front seats for feet to hide. That’s all because, BMW insists, it’s more for people with kids up to the mid-to-late teens, rather than five fully fledged adults.

So it’s good, rather than great. Partly, that’s because it carries such a sultry bodyshell but doesn’t deliver sultry performance. Its body tells lies, promising a level of dynamic brilliance the car just doesn’t quite achieve.

If this had been dressed in the skin of a 3 Series sedan, you’d think it was a small step forward. But it isn’t. It’s dressed in the skin of the 4 Series Coupe, with more doors.

And it doesn’t quite feel like a 4 Series Coupe.