Have been searching for a one BMW I last saw in the 90s.

In the 90s in a place called Mabopane in Pretoria South Africa, I saw a mechanic fixing BMWs two houses away from our rented home, there was a residential yard full of this one BMW that I haven't seen since we left Mabopane. I was still a kid but somehow I still remember its features, the curved backside/boot/trunk unlike other BMWs that had sharp corners.

My biggest problem with BMW is that their designs somehow look the same, so you really need to know what you're looking for.

For example, there's a BMW Alpina the E24 6-Series-based rockets which rarely come up for sale, but when they do, they fetch astronomical numbers. It looks exactly like the one I saw as a kid.

Now let's look at the performance of the BMW E24 as that's possibly the car and where it's at when it comes to the classic collection, and that's if it's there. Firstly it was produced from January 1976 to 1989 and replaced the BMW E9 coupé and got replaced by BMW 6 Series (E63). The BMW E24 came with a 2-door coupé, front-engine on petrol and a rear-wheel-drive.

The E24 shared many parts with the E12 5 series, and in 1982 was updated with parts from the newly released E28 5 series. Does that explain why I find it difficult to identify my favorite car? But I found somewhere that it was mostly the electronics that were from the BMW E28 which updated the BMW E24. Or did I read that wrong?

You could or still can get the E24 with a 4 or 5 speed manual and a 3 speed automatic transmission, but the automatic transmission got an update in 1983 to a 4 speed. With 0 to 100 km/h in 6.4 seconds, a maximum top speed of (255 km/h), that's the E24 6 Series M 635 CSi. Fuel Consumption - Economy - Open road: 7.8 L/100 Km, Highway: 9.7 L/100 Km, City: 16.5 L/100 Km with a fuel Tank Capacity of 70L.

Now the classic collection part. The E24 went on to sell 86,216 cars in a 13-year production life. The E24 was constructed by Karmann, until mid-1977 when BMW took the build in-house and Karmann only produced the steel shell of the 6 Series. The E24 6 Series it's apparently still one of the more affordable ways into a classic BMW, unless your heart is set on the much rarer and pricier M635CSi, and that's mostly what's up for sale.

Wind noise from around the windows and front screen, and tyre noise might be concerning but the large glass makes it easy for visibility. Check for rust on the E24, door bottoms that have drain holes which clog with dirt and sills and sunroof, which also have drains that get silted up. Only mentioning those since Clinca maintains a clean car.

For the M635CSi, usable cars start at around R600,000 but will need a good deal of work to make them perfect. As a result, paying around R1400,000 for an immaculate example is likely to be cheaper in the long run. You can afford this piece of investment, you just bought a Ford Raptor but you still can't afford a mobile car wash session.

Could the BMW E24 be my car? Which ones were made available in South Africa in the 1980s? The 630 CS and 633 CSi coupés of the 1970s, and the 635 CSi arrived in South Africa in 1983.

So, it's likely that I saw it in the 90s.