With the arrival of the Z4 M Coupe in 2006, many people and even some auto publications have relabeled the 1999-2002 M Coupe the Z3 M Coupe.\u00a0 This is not technically correct.\u00a0 While based on the Z3, the name from BMW was simply “M Coupe”.\u00a0 Before the M Coupe and Roadster arrived, BMW M models of the time were named according to their series (i.e. M3 for the 3-series, M5, M6, etc.).\u00a0 BMW probably could have named it the MZ or MZ3, but they chose to name it simply “M”.\u00a0 To me this always meant BMW distilled all the M essence into one unique car, and you could choose to have it in coupe or roadster form.\u00a0 Whether or not that’s what the BMW product planners intended, that’s what I like to think :-).<\/p>\n
Lately, BMW has been adding the M to the end of the title of its off-series M cars.\u00a0 For example, X5 M, X6 M, Z4 M.\u00a0 I assume this is probably because MX5 was already taken by the Mazda Miata and they wanted to be consistent.\u00a0 They didn’t do that with the 1998-2002 M cars.\u00a0 While it’s convenient to add the “Z3” for reference, it takes a way some of the specialness of THE “M”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the arrival of the Z4 M Coupe in 2006, many people and even some auto publications have relabeled the 1999-2002 M Coupe the Z3 M Coupe. This is not technically correct. While based on the Z3, the name from BMW was simply “M Coupe”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.mcoupebuyersguide.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}