Z3 and Z4

Z3 and Z4: How a Spartanburg Roadster Became BMW's Permanent Two-Seater

When BMW's board approved a new, low-volume two-seat roadster for the mid-1990s, the more consequential decision was not what the car would be but where it would be built. BMW had operated exclusively from German soil for its entire history, but the company had just finished commissioning an all-new plant in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, intended initially for 3 Series-adjacent production. Management chose to give that plant the new roadster as its flagship product, and on 20 September 1995 the first Z3 rolled off a line in Greer, South Carolina. That made it the first BMW ever built entirely outside Germany. It was a calculated bet: an American-built European sports car, aimed heavily at the American market that had made the original 328 and the postwar 507 into legends without ever actually building either of them domestically.

BMW did not wait for dealer showrooms to introduce the car to the public. Months before the Z3 reached a single American driveway, Pierce Brosnan's James Bond climbed into one in a Q Branch scene in the 1995 film GoldenEye, drove it briefly through a landscape standing in for Cuba, and then the car largely disappeared from the plot. The screen time amounted to something like forty-five seconds, with no chases and no stunts. It hardly mattered. The car was introduced to the buying public through a movie premiere rather than a motor show, reportedly the first time a manufacturer had done that with a genuinely new production model, and the response was immediate: BMW and its retailers logged thousands of advance orders for a car that would not reach showrooms for months. Figures in the range of nine thousand are commonly cited. A companion "James Bond Edition" Z3, sold in limited numbers through the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, had its original sales target of twenty cars raised to one hundred once the level of customer interest became clear. Later retrospectives, Autoblog's among them, attach an oft-repeated figure of $240 million in advance sales to the placement; the number circulates in enthusiast and specialist-press writing rather than in any BMW financial disclosure, and has become durable marketing lore.

Underneath the marketing spectacle sat a genuinely conventional piece of BMW engineering, which was itself part of the point. The Z3, chassis code E36/7, borrowed its underpinnings substantially from the contemporary E36 3 Series, including a live rear axle in its earliest, lowest-powered forms. That detail drew criticism from road testers used to independent rear suspensions on cars wearing sporting badges. BMW's engineers treated the Z3 as a way to repurpose existing, well-proven components into an emotionally different package rather than as a clean-sheet halo project, a strategy that kept costs and risk down while the Spartanburg plant was still finding its footing as BMW's first non-German production site. Later, more powerful Z3s gained the independent multi-link rear axle from the 3 Series, and the range grew to include four- and six-cylinder engines up through the 2.8-litre and, eventually, six-cylinder M variants. The M Roadster and M Coupe, introduced from 1997 onward and powered by the S50/S52 and later S54 straight-sixes shared with the contemporary M3, gave the Z3 a genuinely serious performance variant; the awkwardly proportioned M Coupe in particular has since become a cult object among enthusiasts precisely because of the styling compromises BMW's designers accepted to fit a hatchback body over the roadster's chassis.

Production of the original Z3 continued through June 2002, and Wikipedia gives a lifetime total of 297,087 cars across all body styles and markets, a figure usually rounded to 297,000. Just as clear is the car's commercial importance to BMW's American manufacturing ambitions: the Z3 proved that Spartanburg could build a car to BMW's quality standard for a demanding home market, and the plant's subsequent expansion into X5, X3, and later SUV production for global export owes something to the credibility the Z3 program established in its first years.

BMW replaced the Z3 for 2003 with the Z4, chassis codes E85 (roadster) and, from 2006, E86 (coupe), the product of Chris Bangle-era studio work that gave the car a much more sculptural, flame-surfaced body than the comparatively conservative Z3 had worn. The Z4 continued to be built at the same Greer, South Carolina plant, keeping BMW's American manufacturing commitment intact, and a fixed-roof coupe body, the E86, joined the roadster, though it remained a comparatively low-volume variant: Wikipedia gives 17,094 coupes over its roughly two-year run, against 180,856 E85 roadsters. A Z4 M version, using the S54 six from the outgoing Z3 M, briefly extended the performance range from 2006 to 2008, closing out the naturally aspirated straight-six chapter of the lineage.

The Z4's second generation, chassis code E89, arrived for the 2009 model year and made a more decisive engineering statement: it was the first Z-series model to use a retractable metal hardtop rather than a folding soft top, trading some of the coupe's structural benefits and the roadster's lighter weight for the packaging convenience of a single body that could be either. The E89 ran through August 2016 across a wide spread of turbocharged and naturally aspirated four- and six-cylinder engines badged sDrive18i through sDrive35is, and it marked the point at which the Z4 shifted from being read primarily as an emotional, styling-led product toward being marketed more explicitly as a driver's roadster competing directly with the Mercedes-Benz SLK and Porsche Boxster.

The third-generation Z4, chassis code G29, whose production ended in spring 2026, represents the most structurally unusual chapter in the lineage's history: rather than developing the car entirely in-house, BMW co-developed its underlying architecture with Toyota, sharing it with the fifth-generation Toyota Supra that launched alongside it. Both cars are assembled by contract manufacturer Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria. That means the Z4, once the flagbearer for BMW's American manufacturing expansion, ended its run built in Europe under a joint program with a Japanese partner, a full-circle shift in the platform's industrial story. The G29 also returned to a folding fabric soft top after the E89's hardtop experiment, a choice BMW's engineers explained largely in terms of weight and trunk-space packaging. With the last G29s out of Graz in the spring of 2026, BMW closed a lineage that began, deliberately, as an American-built answer to a question a British spy asked on screen three decades earlier.

BMW moved E89 assembly away from Spartanburg entirely: production ran instead at BMW's Regensburg, Germany plant, which built more than 115,000 examples of the roadster-only E89 between February 2009 and its final car on 22 August 2016, so the Z-series' production left the United States a full generation before the G29's move to Austria, not with it. The E85 roadster body, meanwhile, accounted for roughly 180,856 of the E85/E86 generation's total production, dwarfing the 17,094 low-volume E86 coupe, while the Z3's own performance flagship, the M Coupe, found roughly 6,291 buyers worldwide (2,858 in North America, 3,433 in Europe and other markets) against the more popular M Roadster's 15,322.

The Coupe BMW's Own Management Didn't Order

The Z3 M Coupe, the hatchback-bodied performance variant enthusiasts still call the "clown shoe" for its stubby, high-tailed profile, did not begin as an approved product program. According to accounts from people involved, BMW's R&D chief at the time, Burkhard Göschel, and a small group of engineers built the car after hours and without a formal mandate, reshaping an early Z3 chassis into a closed coupe using foam and foil mockups before committing to sheet metal, driven by a straightforward engineering problem: the M Roadster's open body flexed more than the engineers wanted under the M engine's power, and a fixed roof was the direct structural fix. When the finished shape was presented to BMW's board, the initial reaction was reportedly bewilderment rather than enthusiasm. The styling had none of the roadster's conventional proportions. As the story is retold today, it took an actual test drive, rather than the design sketches, to get the car approved for limited production. The strange shape did real structural work: the fixed roof, strengthened windshield surround, and added chassis bracing gave the M Coupe meaningfully more torsional rigidity than the open M Roadster, at the cost of a silhouette that took collectors roughly two decades to fully embrace. Cars once treated as unsellable oddities have traded for as much as roughly $100,000 at the top of the market, a reversal the "clown shoe" nickname itself survived, worn now as an affectionate badge rather than an insult.