The M3, M5 and M6 were the first products of the M division destined for the United States.
There's also a carryover of the optional M Sport Package, from the brand's high-performance M division, with some tailored suspension bits, wheels and upholstery accents.
Special M badging distinguishes the cars from the standard models, but the bodies bear few other outward signifiers of the M division.
Motorsport would continue running BMW competition efforts while the new M division took charge of road cars and the M brand.
FOR 40 years BMW's M division has been the substance behind the company's claim of having created the Ultimate Driving Machine.
The magazine cited Kay Segler, the brand's chief executive and the former head of BMW Group's high-performance M division, as its source.
BMW's 2013 M6 coupe and convertible, with a fierce 560-horsepower, twin-turbocharged V-8, are the latest luxury weapons from the vaunted high-performance M division.
And like every model that wears the badge of BMW's high-performance M division, the M3 has become steadily more extravagant.
(The Detroit News) BMW released details this week about its first M Performance vehicles, conceived to fit between the high-performance cars of the M division and their standard equivalents.
In the decades that followed, though, it was BMW — specifically its performance-obsessed M division, recently turned 40 — that established a dynasty of factory-built sport sedans that could hurtle, handle and stop as well as many sports cars.
In the span of about a decade starting in the mid-1960s, a handful of similar enterprises, with names like Dana, Nickey and Yenko, sprang up and thrived, drawing the blueprints for later ventures like AMG, the Mercedes-Benz tuner, and the M Division of BMW.
