Here's Why the BMW Z1 Is the Strangest Modern BMW

this is a BMW z1 you've probably heard of the z3 z4 and the Z eight but if you haven't heard of the z1 well you're in for a treat here's a little overview the z1 is a two-seat roadster with two doors and as you can see the doors don't swing out like normal doors instead they go down into the body more on that in a second now the z1 was sold for only a few years in the late 1980s through June 1991 and BMW only made 8,000 of these I strongly suspect the reason it's so rare is because of the price tag back when this car was new in 1990 it cost more than a BMW 7-series it cost as much as a new Porsche 911 the equivalent of around $100,000 in today's money even though it was based on the BMW 3-series and it used the same engine from the 3-series of its time now one major reason why you may have never heard of the z1 if you live in North America is that BMW never sold this car in the United States or in Canada and yet I've traveled all the way to La Jolla California near San Diego to review this imported one which I've borrowed from La Jolla independent an excellent BMW shop here in La Jolla that's basically heaven for BMW enthusiasts today I'm gonna take you on a tour of the zy I'm going to show you all of its weird quirks and unusual features including the most obvious one which I'm sure you're already wondering about then I'm going to get it out on the road and find out how the z1 drives and then I'm gonna give it a dug score and for more of my thoughts on the z1 go to autotrader.com oversteer where I've also compiled a list of some other interesting BMW models that I suspect you've never heard of okay so I'm gonna start where you obviously want me to start and that would be with the doors yes the doors retract into the body when you want to get inside the car and yes they come back up when you want to close them I'm not really sure why they did this they're trying to be cool and different and they succeeded now I've always assumed that in order to get into a z1 or out you pull this thing this door handle well it turns out that has no effect pulling that person that doesn't do anything don't touch it instead if you want the doors to go up and down you press this after unlocking it and they pop right up and as you can see the window closes as the door closes and so now it's flush but I put on the top I could then lock it using this little silver thing here and then the car would be locked just like any normal car I want to get back in again I don't push the handle or push down on the door anything I walk up I push the silver thing and the door retracts surprisingly quickly and of course the window retracts too and now I can step inside now obviously that begs the question how do you get inside this car because the doors are as they are BMW I'd to put all of the crash protection and structure for the car below them so this door sill is incredibly high and as a result there's a little bit of a technique to getting in really the easiest way to do it is first put one leg in then grab on to this little roll bar on the top of the windshield more on that in a minute and then get inside it's not that difficult or that bad especially once you get used to it but it is worth noting that one of the reasons I did it that way is you're not supposed to sit on this ultimately this is the top of the door and it won't support your weight so you can't sit on this and you'll climb over it when you're getting inside is e1 good to know just in case you ever happen to get inside a z1 of course getting out is also kind of complicated again grab the roll bar on the windshield and then just do what you got to do it's not incredibly difficult but then again it's also not incredibly easy and I imagine it'd be a lot harder if you were wearing a skirt or a dress but let's go back now you're in your z1 and you're wondering alright well how do I close the door well again you don't do anything with this exterior door handle in fact I have no idea why that's there it doesn't have any apparent function in this car instead you pull a little latch get it inside the interior it looks a lot like any other BMW door latch except well it's next to your shin you pull it and the door closes and so now the doors closed just like in any normal car in fact sitting here in this position with the door up this looks just like a normal car with a normal driving position except for the fact that the door panel has basically nothing on it which is unusual now let's say it's time to get out what do I do I pull that latch again the door slides back down and then it's time for me to climb out it's actually surprisingly simple considering this is such a novel and bizarre concept something else I like about the door situation in the z1 on a normal car your passenger gets out they forget to close the door or they don't close it all the way you have to get out walk all the way around and close the door again and the z1 no problem just reach over pull the latch and the door closes there's nothing like a nice automatic door that closes upwards now there are two other interesting things worth noting about the z1 doors one of which is the fact that when the door is in its up position you can roll down a window like in any normal car so you can have the door up in the window down and just you're cruising along like you're in a little roadster and put the window up basically any normal vehicle does that but when the door is in its down position they don't let you do anything with the windows you're just stuck with the door down then again I have no idea why you'd want to bother with the windows or with putting the doors up because in this car yes it's true you can drive around with the doors in the down position and it's glorious [Music] okay so you've seen how the doors work you've seen how to get inside the car from the outside out from inside all that stuff you might think I'm done with the doors but not quite because there are a couple of other interesting things that happen when you make a car with doors that slide downwards instead of open for example the doors can't really contain anything because sometimes they might be bounced you can't put anything on them now there aside from that exterior door handle which has no apparent function everything else has been relocated off the doors and that is more stuff than you think for instance the exterior keyhole like I showed you before is on the bodywork itself so it doesn't move when the doors go up and down that one's pretty obvious but how about the mirror in virtually every other car the mirror is on the doors but not in this one because when the doors are down you would be able to see anything so the mirror is moved to the windshield frame that's kind of interesting but how about this the mirror controls in your car they're probably on the door in this car they're hidden in the center console underneath the climate controls they operate just like normal mirror controls but you'd never know where to find them unless you know where to find them also interesting in the same vein are the interior door handles like I showed you before they look like normal interior door handles but you don't often see interior door handles mounted basically on the floor of the car and then how about this now on the outside you can lock the doors using the key and that lock that's on the bodywork like I showed you but when you're sitting inside with the doors up you can't lock the doors it's not possible to lock the doors in the inside of this car when you're in it then again a carjacker or a thief would have to really know a lot about BMWs to even figure out how to get inside this thing one more interesting door related quirk I was told it's fine to open the doors when you're getting in showing it off in a video but don't overdo it because replacing the belts that move the doors up and down it's kind of a process for one thing so you have to remove the doors to do it and the doors themselves weigh more than 150 pounds so it's a bit of an annoyance now although the doors are by far the quirkiest and the strangest thing about the z1 and what it's most known for there are a couple of other interesting quirks and features the biggest of which is the body panels now this may look like a normal car with normal body panels but actually they're plastic that isn't metal now I'll get to why they did the plastic panels in just a minute but for now take a look at these body panels one of the things that happens to plastic body panels after 25 or 30 years as they can start to crack which is kind of unfortunate but that's a reality when you have plastic body panels just like in your Saturn another interesting thing about the z1 is the hood opening now I'll bring the hood itself is actually pretty easy just pull a little latch and it pops right open except you go around to open the hood and it only comes up this much well that's because the hood in this car opens this way now you may think that's odd but actually a lot of BMWs for a long time had their hoods open this way and BMW only stopped this practice in the early to mid 1990s another interesting quirk about the z1 is this bar that sticks out from the windshield now in most convertible cars that are difficult to get into you're told no matter how hard it is to get into never touch the windshield because if you put your weight on the windshield frame you couldn't buckle it which obviously can screw things up but in this car this bar sticks out of the windshield and it's the roll bar they didn't mount one back here this is the roll bar which means if you roll over this bar can support the entire weight of the car now because of that you can put your weight on this bar when you're trying to get in and out of the car in fact you can put as much weight on it as you want to and it won't cause any problems now the other function that this bar has is that it is where BMW has mounted the Sun visors and they are the tiniest Sun visors I've ever seen in any car ever now I've said this a lot about various exotic sports cars that I reviewed over time but this is the new tiny Sun Visor champion by far one other interesting quirk about this car is the fact that there's no dome light obviously it's a convertible so they couldn't stick one up here and they didn't want to stick one on the windshield because of this bar so instead they place the dome lights in rather unusual places one of them is between the seats there's a little light that aims down at the center console mounted on the carpet between the seats the other one is even stranger it's where the glovebox would have been you have your normal dome light it's like they just moved it from the top to there in the passenger side another thing about the z1 is that it has unique seats although BMW was building sporty cars from the z1 came out it wasn't building any other sports car so these tight little sports seats were reserved solely for this car now speaking of the seats this car has a glovebox but it isn't in the normal place you'd expect to find a glove box instead they've placed it in the single most inconvenient place possible and that would be behind the passenger seat so we were to get to it not only you have to fold the passenger seat forward but you have to move it up and then you can access the glovebox in other words don't keep anything in the glovebox that you may actually need access to well you know you're driving but aside from the few interesting interior quirks that I already covered this car is actually surprisingly normal on the inside and I was told that before I came here it actually feels just like an e30 BMW 3-series the climate controls are where you'd expect the stereos where you'd expect there's nothing strange with the gauge cluster or with the turn signal stocks of a parking brake or the shifter or the window controls it's all fairly normal I guess BMW spent most of their development budget we're defying the doors and the body panels and they stopped short of making the interior any stranger than it needed to be next up since I'm talking about storage it's time to talk about the trunk which is another interesting cork of the z1 now in order to open the trunk you push this little silver keel just like you do with the doors and then it opens right up now the trunk isn't very big and I wasn't really expecting it to be but to me the interesting thing about the trunk is just how tiny the opening is it's probably barely bigger than a foot in fact I don't even know how to get that tire in here but they did nonetheless this is all you get in terms of trunk space in the z1 and of course that's not the only thing in this car that's small how about the tiny little fuel door mounted right here on the rear fender and there's no security this filled door doesn't lock you don't pop it from the inside you just walk up open it right up and inside there's the fuel cambium buddy didn't waste any space inside this fuel door with unnecessary whatever and those aren't the only things that are surprisingly tiny on this car how about up front you're used to the BMW grilles being giant focal points in the front of the BMWs but this car it has the grilles but they're just so small and they're all the way in the front they're sort of at the bottom of the bumper so you might not notice but they're still there after all it is a BMW and speaking of badging and emblems I've always found the z1 badge on the rear of these to be kind of odd now these days BMW uses separate badges for each letter five three five or whatever but back in the day they used to all be connected so BMW could save money on badging but there wasn't really an easy way to connect a Z to a one so they just took a line from the bottom of the Z to the top of the one and it resulted in this the end result is that it looks more like you're driving around on a BMW Z a then a z1 doesn't really look all that good nonetheless that's what they decided to do okay so those are all the interesting quirks and the cool features of the z1 but there's still one quirk left to mention and that would be the body panels now as I showed you before this car had plastic body panels and I told you I was gonna tell you more about that well here's the more about that the body panels were intended to be removable the theory was you could buy a full separate set of body panels in case you wanted to change the color of your z1 on a whim so you could have two sets and BMW claimed that you could change them out in 40 minutes only there was a problem the TV show wheeler-dealers which is an excellent show they did an episode with a BMW z1 and they changed out the body panels and it actually took them six hours so I strongly suspect nobody really took advantage of changing the color of their z1 as BMW intended now although the removable body panels themselves are interesting something I find almost as unusual is the fact that this car has a very green interior to match its green exterior the steering wheel is green the carpeting is green the backs of the seats are green even the trunk carpeting is green it seems strange to me that a car that was designed so that you could swap its colors would have such an interior that is devoted to the color it came with initially another interesting thing about the color swapping is that this particular z1 does display one example of its color-changing capabilities up here now all the Z ones were sold with headlight housings that match their original color but in this car they're red now red was by far the most common color on a z1 but this car obviously is green and yet it has the red headlight housings they were switched out at some point so perhaps there's a red z1 driving around out there somewhere with green headlights anyway time to get this thing out on the road and see how it performs and remember the z1 has the same engine from the e30 BMW 325i even though back in 1990 this thing cost as much as a new Porsche 911 driving the z1 [Music] this is the most bizarre experience driving a vehicle without doors I don't even know what is going on here now the interesting thing I've been told and it seems to be true that this car is really just an e30 3-series with a different body and an r/t even in 30 seconds of driving I can tell the powertrain the shifter of the clutch it all feels like that hilarious I actually love this you know I've been in La Jolla which is like this little beach town just north to San Diego and this is the perfect car for this you know that it's it's not sunny but it's warm out and the beach is right there and this is a great little beach car it's like a Mini Moke except it's fast and fun the funny thing is if I want I can put the doors up as I'm driving nice little more it does sort of feel like an e30 in here it has the same basic cockpit the center console is a little bit different few things are a little different the seats are obviously different but in terms of performance it clearly feels like that but one big difference is this particular vehicle doesn't have doors I love BMWs I love the shifter action I love the clutch this car is 25 almost 30 years old now and it's still BMWs just feels so fun to drive when they have a stick shift the clutch it's like you know what you're doing instantly the shifter feels so good it's tight but it's not so hard that you're having trouble moving in it's just awesome now as I get going above 50 70 kilometers an hour the wind starts to go I'm wearing shorts the wind starts to come up and sort of push my shorts up so it's something I got to be careful for I don't know where to put my left arm you do one of these I don't know how to what to do I have any trouble focusing on the physical driving experience because the open-air existence of this thing is so bizarre this is just one of the stranger things I've seen there's a Cadillac Allante and I thought that was an odd car it's an old car you know it doesn't handle that well the really interesting thing about this car is it's just not all that fast I can't imagine what what would have happened if they had tried to sell this for the price of a 911 there's a Murai that's an interesting car this is great but I have to admit the novelty of this car is completely rooted the coolness is completely rooted in the no doors thing the performance at only 170 horsepower the performance ain't there if you're buying this thing to really floor it and really get excited and have some fun you're gonna be sorely disappointed there's a ton of fun of flex when you go over bumps the entire windshield frame shakes it's hard enough to make a car rigid when it doesn't have a roof remove the doors and here you're in a whole different world all right flooring it now yeah yeah this thing is it fast it's not slow but it's no faster than an e30 325i which is we all know is not a tremendously fast car I'll be it it's a it's a fun one this is a fun car and so is that I'm told when you drive on the highway there's so much wind coming in with the doors down that you just end up putting them up the interesting thing is there's very few cars very few sports cars that are I mean Jeep Wrangler people can take off their doors BMW z4 people they can't so this is an unusual thing the thing that I like about this car though is I'm having fun I'm not really doing anything crazy in terms of speed or performance but I'm having a ton of fun because this is the most bizarre experience I've had in a car in forever so that's the BMW z1 it has the performance of a slightly sporty earth three series it has the removable body panels and bizarre doors of a concept car it has the quirks and features of a typical 1980s BMW with a few extra tossed in there and it had the original price tag of a Porsche 911 although they're not going for that much now these days it's easy to find one on the used market for about 35 to 50,000 euros or roughly 40 to $60,000 either way it is one of the strangest BMWs of all time one of the most bizarre and you may never see one again and now it's time to give it a dug score starting with the weekend categories and styling does e1 is fine but not especially gorgeous it's very much a product of its late 1980s early 1990s time period and it's a bit stubby it earns a 6 out of 10 acceleration is poor the z1 to 0 to 60 in seven point five to eight seconds depending on what source you believe but either way that gives it a 1 out of 10 handling is relatively neutral it's pretty good but there's a lot of chassis flex and ultimately it feels like the 27 year old car that it is earning a 5 out of 10 cool factor however is undeniable pull up at a Cars and Coffee with a z1 and anyone looking at a Countach suddenly won't be because they'll be looking at you instead it may not be fast or high-tech but it's very cool and it gets a 9 out of 10 as for importance I have to admit I thought this car was more important before I spent the day with it but now I realize it's more odd than significant still it has a special place in this world especially for BMW fans and it gets a 7 out of 10 that brings the total weekend scored a 28 out of 50 tying it with another ultra cool car with a disappointing driving experience the Lamborghini lm002 next up are the daily categories starting with features and while the z1 was fine for its time period it's pretty low on equipment judging by today's standards as I do for the Doug score so it gets a 3 out of 10 Comfort is fine it's relatively luxurious but not exactly coddling and the interior isn't especially roomy or easy to get in and out of so it gets a 4 out of 10 quality is decent materials are nice and reliability with this motor is well known to be pretty good but it's certainly no standout and it gets a 6 out of 10 practicality is low with just to see it's a glovebox that's impossible to access and 9.2 cubic feet of cargo space so it gets a 3 out of 10 and then there's value for $8,000 ish is a lot of money to spend for an e30 with a different body but this is one of the coolest BMWs around even if it's not the fastest plus it's holding its value pretty well so I'm giving it a 6 out of 10 bring you the total daily score to 22 out of 50 which is once again in the lower third as a result it's no surprise that the total Doug score is 50 out of 100 which is relatively low the z1 isn't fast it isn't especially thrilling to drive it isn't high tech and it's pretty expensive but it is ultra cool I love driving around with the doors down and I'm so glad I had the chance to drive this one [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 2,719,786

Rating: 4.8305278 out of 5

Keywords: bmw z1, z1, bmw, bmw doors, weird doors bmw, weird doors, strange car doors, bmw z1 roadster, bmw z3, old bmw, bmw convertible, doug demuro, demuro

Id: ssbSc0gaI04

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Xarvas]

Needs "It's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand" sticker.

[u/julietcharliesierra]

Congrats on a million subs Doug! Watching your videos with my dinner is the most relaxing part of my day 👌

[u/Ianm9]

Doug is the type of guy to have one million subscribers!

[u/Kalanth]

Doug, clearly entertaining himself with a crack about the car being different because it doesn't have doors. Love his infectious enthusiasm.

[u/SnakePlane]

Do you have a Z8 lined up?

[u/graham_excess]

So it's possible to have the top up with the doors down, then?

[u/rsmtirish]

What happened to uploading on Tuesday and Thursday? 11am on those days has been a part of my schedule for a while now.

[u/ruler_gurl]

Wow cracking body panels...fun. So where do the doors actually end up when retracted? The sill is quite high but it doesn't look quite high enough to contain the entire door sequestered vertically. Does it kind of roll part way under the seat or something?

For something as novel as this, I'm kind of underwhelmed. I can see why it hasn't really taken off well in the collector marketplace. Z8s are fetching like 3x what these are.

[u/dyonisos911]

/u/Doug-Demuro, I just bought a brand new 55" Smart TV. Seeing you this "big" is weird.

Side note: as I am originally from "BMW heartland" close to BMW's formerly biggest plant Dingolfing, I had the rare chance to see a Z8 and a Z1 waiting together for service at my local BMW dealer.