Car guys are sometimes very strange people. They will save for their whole lives to buy the cars of their dreams. Some might be so taken with a car that they could never afford that they construct a car that looks like their exotic dream car, but is built on a very ordinary chassis—for example, building a Porsche 917 replica from a VW Beetle; or a Ferrari F40 from a Pontiac Fiero.
That’s kind of what happened in Russia, except that in this case, a very exciting, very sophisticated chassis was used to build a vehicle that looked like the dream car of an old Soviet party apparatchik or a Swedish playboy.
So what was the donor car for this experiment in double-reverse engineering? Try to stay calm: it’s an E92 BMW M3.
Bilenkin is a Russian company that will transform a perfectly good M3 into a perfectly less good, and definitely less-good-looking Bilenkin Vintage. Yes, the company’s imagination in creating model names is almost as good as its imagination of what to do with an E92 M3, which is to say, questionable.
What they have done is put a retro body and interior onto the basic M3. Many of the BMW’s safety systems remain intact, as do some of the electronics like iDrive, and the coupe’s roofline is still there. But the rest appears to look a lot like a Volvo P1800 with a little bit of Volga Gaz 21 thrown in. The Gaz 21, by the way, was mainstream Soviet cold-war-era machinery.
The Vintage definitely is more potent than either of those cars, both in handling and performance, since it has the M3’s suspension and a 400-horsepower V8 under the hood. No need for a power bulge here.
Apparently there must be a market for a retro car that evokes the old Swedish sports car and old Russian sedan. At least enough of a market for the Bilenkin company to use them as inspiration for the Vintage.
The exterior of the Vintage looks dated, to be sure, but the interior is quite impressive, with lots of leather, wood, and even gemstones. Maybe even Elvis might have loved it when he was just starting out in the 1950s, if he wasn’t already a Cadillac man.
Bilenkin sells the Vintage for the equivalent of $130,000 although it’s not clear if that includes the price of an E92 M3 or not. Well, you can’t blame the Russians for trying. On second thought, yes you can. Leave the M3s alone.—Scott Blazey
[Photos courtesy of CNet.]
