BMW 328 from the good old days

I'm in techno overload after days on end with Benz flagships, tiny electric city cars and BMWs that drive themselves. It seems computers can do everything and anything today, from setting your ideal cabin to preparing for some sort of crash or ensuring you don't have one. 

There are Apps to tell you car when to charge, and when to feed its battery pack back into the grid to make you money, and plastic bodywork that is a strong as steel. To be honest, I'm craving seat time in something simple, like an EH Holden ute. And I should apologise for coming back to my current Bucklet List leader.

So, as I wind down from too many cars and too much technology I'm sliding back more than 70 years into a brilliant BMW that's as basic as they come. It's a 328, but nothing like the 328 in showrooms today. This one is an old-school roadster that was developed for keen drivers with cash before World War II.

It was actually delivered in Australia, complete with right-hand drive, although it's now part of the BMW museum collection in Munich. It's been cleaned and fuelled, but otherwise is just as its maker intended - in the days, no decades, before computers took over the road.

My first and only drama with this 328 is my shoes, which are too wide for the tiny pedals. So they come off and we set off with my socks doing the driving work. And what a drive. The 328 starts first time, even though it's got an old-school distributor and carburettors, and there is a snarling back through the exhaust as I work up through the four-speed manual gearbox.

There is plenty of kickback through the steering, and the car wanders far more than a modern one, but that's part of the charm and enjoyment. This is real driving, not just transport in a cocoon-on-wheels from the 21st century.

My host Stefan Behr is helping with the turn-signal switch and advice on overtaking, and we're both laughing and waving in the bright summer sunshine. The 328 draws plenty of looks and there is one long conversation at traffic lights as my co-driver runs through the car's history with an old-timer in the next car.

The 328 runs faultlessly, although I have to make extra allowances for the ancient brakes and a chassis that would be easilyl trumped through corners by a Hyundai i20. And I'm only now realising there is no seatbelt, let alone airbags, not that I have any intention of crashing this priceless piece of history.

My drive times runs out far too fast but I'm still smiling several hours later and enjoy re-telling the stories of the day. My favourite? Well, it's something about the old-timer but with a modern twist on greed cameras.

Amazingly, a radar warning outside one of the small Munich hamlets catches the 328 at 77km/h in an 80 zone, which is safe enough on all fronts. But then I realise that, way back in 1938, they built speedometers with incredible accuracy and the dial in front of me is holding steady at 76. Not bad without a computer, eh?



This reporter is on Twitter: @paulwardgover