The BMW Z4 is dead ending a 30-year lineage of Bavarian roadsters

The BMW lineup will for the first time in 30 years be without a two-seat sports car before the end of the year. You can no longer configure the current Z4 in the UK, as the German marque closes orders ahead of its discontinuation. The third-generation Z4 had been on sale since 2018 and was famously twinned technically with Toyota’s A90 Supra, which was also discontinued earlier this year.

The Z4 never rose to become the all-out Porsche Boxster rival that we always hoped it might. That said, we’ve always enjoyed slightly different lanes the model slid into with the introduction of the second-generation car in 2009 – one of a softer grand tourer, certainly more in line with the US market where it found the most success. The first BMW Z4 was built in the US at BMW’s Spartanburg facility in South Carolina, though for later models production moved to Europe, the latest being built alongside the Supra on Magna Steyr’s Graz production line.

The current Z4 ends a line of two-seat roadsters that began with the Z3 back in 1995, that continued with the first-generation Z4 in 2002. There was never any overlap with BMW’s original modern era roadster, the quirky Z1, and the Z3, the former ending production in 1991 four years before the Z3 was introduced.

The Z3 began life as a much more compact, seemingly driver-oriented Roadster than the Z4 became in its later years. It never quite met the expectations of such a model however, prompting BMW M to develop a stiffer, more dynamically potent hardtop model, the cult classic M Coupe ‘Breadvan’. Never the perfect sports car answer to the Porsche 911, the Breadvan is beloved by critics and fans alike for its bristling character.

The Z4 that followed was again quite a raw car but lacked the finesse to give it a firm place as a true Boxster rival. Likewise the latter Coupe and stonking M models with their singing S54 3.2-litre straight-six. BMW gave up on making the Z4 a proper Porsche-rivalling sports car with the second-gen Z4 of 2009 – a softer, heavier, larger Z4 that never got an M version. Many fantasized at the time about BMW M stuffing the E92 M3’s howling naturally aspirated V8 under its bonnet but that only ever happened with the GT3 race car.

> BMW Z4 M40i Handschalter v Toyota Supra – manual sixes go head-to-head

The outgoing model was a fine go at injecting the Z4 with some proper dynamism without sacrificing comfort. Its dynamic improvements were perhaps inevitable, given how stringent Toyota’s demands were for the platform it was to share for the Supra. It certainly struck the best balance we’d yet seen of sporting capability and refinement. The final Z4 Handschalter with its extra power and manual transmission, might have been the best BMW roadster there’s ever been, if not one of, so the model goes out on a high.