Monday, 3 August 2026. Welcome back to another instalment of Cardle of the Day, the series where we play through the daily puzzle at Cardle and then spend a few hundred words celebrating over whatever car was hiding behind those crops.
How Cardle Works
If you haven’t played before, the premise is beautifully simple. Each day, Cardle presents five progressively less cropped photographs of the same car. Clue one is almost abstract, something that could belong to almost anything with four wheels. By clue five, enough of the car is visible so a reasonably attentive enthusiast should be able to name it.
Today’s Puzzle: another one of those
Today’s puzzle gave us little to work with early on. Clue one was not the best, but in retrospect, it will be enough for owners and those obsessed about the car – not for me. It was only by clue three that I knew, in fact. I wasn’t 100% right, but the game took my guess: BMW M3.
The benchmark
The BMW M3 has been making enthusiasts argue since 1986, when the original E30 generation car arrived as a homologation special built to compete in touring car racing. That first M3 used a high revving four cylinder engine, unusual for a BMW of the era, and went on to win the Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft multiple times. It was a racing car with number plates, and the road car carried that power convincingly.
What followed across six generations is one of the more consistent records in the performance saloon segment. The E46 M3, produced between 2000 and 2006, is widely regarded as a high water mark for analogue driver engagement, featuring a naturally aspirated 3.2 litre straight-six producing 343 hp – definitely my favourite. The current G80 generation, launched in 2021, controversially adopted a wide body look and a turbocharged inline six producing up to 530 hp in Competition xDrive form, numbers that would have seemed implausible for a road legal M3 not long ago.
The E46 M3’s S54 engine is still considered one of the finest naturally aspirated units BMW’s M division has produced. Fast forward some years, and the G80 M3 was the first M3 offered with all wheel drive as a factory option. What keeps the M3 relevant is the weight of expectation the nameplate carries and, more often than not, the way each generation manages to meet it on its own terms. Enthusiasts have declared the M3 dead at every generational change, and every generation has found its own audience. That’s a harder trick to pull off than it seems. Especially when you are the benchmark all others are measured against. See you tomorrow!
