If the BMW M4 CSL is the hardcore, track car in the G80 family then the M3 CS is the serious performance car. The M4 CSL has the power and the lightweight efforts to beat the M3 CS on paper but the latter has something the former doesn’t—traction. Despite all of the M4 CSL’s fury, lightweight efforts, and grippy tires, it struggles to deploy all of its 543 horsepower without shredding its rear tires to pieces. The M3 CS, however, sports xDrive all-wheel drive and can deliver the same amount of power to the road. In this new video from AutoTopNL, we get to see what happens when it does that.
The BMW M3 CS is sort of like a CSL-lite. It’s faster, sharper, and more capable than the standard M3 but it doesn’t get all of the lightweight efforts that the CSL does but it gets some. So it still has a slightly stripped out interior, a carbon fiber hood instead of a conventional one, and it lost some of its sound deadening materials. So it weighs about 75 lbs less than a standard M3 Competition xDrive, which is nice but it isn’t enough to make a huge performance difference.
With the same 543 horsepower as the M4 CSL, just with all-wheel drive, the M3 CS rockets from 0-62 mph in 3.2 seconds in this new video. However, I suspect it could do quicker than that. We’ve seen the M3 Competition xDrive nail 0-60 in just a hair under three seconds in some videos. It’s unclear if the timing equipment uses a one-foot rollout, like many do, so that could be why it’s slower than we’ve seen before. Still, 3.2 seconds is a seriously fast time for a sedan of the M3 CS’s size.
It sounds a bit different, too. Thanks to titanium silencers, the M3 CS has a slightly angrier noise than the standard car, which is what you want from a car with a ‘CS’ badge. It isn’t drastic but if you’re buying the CS version, you want a spicier noise, so thankfully it has one. The M2 CS also looks cooler, thanks to its killer wheels and subtle aero tweaks, such as the rear decklid lip spoiler. If you option the wheels in gold, it looks even better. While I’m not sure the gold wheels work all that well on this Signal Green car but it’s hard to complain about BMW offering Signal Green as a stock option.
I think with a better surface and better conditions, the BMW M3 CS can go faster than this, though. I’d like to see someone break into the two-second range, as I think that’s what it’s capable of. However, it’s still shockingly fast as-is.
