BMW 335d Touring (E91)
Why 8.7: A 3.0-litre straight-six diesel with two turbochargers of different sizes handing over to each other, making 286 hp and 580 Nm while still returning 40 mpg on a motorway run. BMW sold the 335d saloon in America for three model years and never once offered the Touring, so the car Europeans treat as the default fast estate barely registers there.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Two turbochargers of different sizes hand over around 2,800 rpm, and a 3.0 straight-six diesel has a low, even hum no four-cylinder oil-burner reaches. But it still clatters at idle, the 580 Nm arrives as one shove rather than a crescendo, and 4,800 rpm ends it. Effortless, never tuneful.
6-cylinder · turbocharged · 4,800 rpm redline · rated 4.0 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €48k (2008) → €12k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Two ISOFIX positions on the outer rear seats, the outer pair being the ones the standard covers.
The rear anchors are the supported route — the manual points child seats there, and front-passenger ISOFIX is the exception rather than the rule. A belt-mounted seat up front needs the airbag off, and cars with a rear row don't always fit a deactivation switch, precisely because the rear seats exist.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The M57D30TU2 is the reason this car exists as anything other than a rep-mobile. Two turbochargers in series — a small one that is already working at 1,500 rpm, a large one that takes over above about 2,800 — give it a shove that no petrol six of the era could match below 3,000 rpm, and BMW paired it with rear-wheel drive and a torque-converter automatic that was never asked to do anything clever. The result is a 1,690 kg estate that will cross a country at 150 km/h on one tank, tow a trailer, and cost about the same to run as a diesel Passat. That combination produced an ownership pattern almost unique in this index: 335d Tourings are among the highest-mileage enthusiast cars in Europe, routinely passing 250,000 km with the original engine and gearbox, because the people who bought them bought them specifically to cover distance. The known weak points are well documented and comparatively cheap — swirl flaps, the EGR cooler, glow plugs, and the timing chain on early cars — and there is a large enough owners' community that none of it is a mystery. There is no collector market. A good one costs less than a year's depreciation on a new 3-series, which is exactly why the current owner is usually the third or fourth and has no intention of selling it to anybody. In America the same engine, detuned to 265 hp, was sold only in the saloon and only for 2009–2011; the estate is a personal-import curiosity there and the everyday hero here.