The BMW E36 is right in the sweet spot of affordable, prestigious performance cars. It is an Internet-beloved, desirable, track-able machine. It is also a finicky bitch.

You may remember our favorite West Virginian hoon shredding tires in his Mustang in Germany, or watching super fast Japanese drifters under a parasol. Now we get to see him stuck in the middle of a Bavarian donut factory.

More cops showed up at this year's Bimmerfest, but that didn't stop people from trying to get a few burnouts in. This E36 driver showed why that was unwise, getting pulled over just as he peeled out.

Many of our readers were shocked by Germany's big win in the Door Panel Edition of the Junkyard Build Quality challenge, with an Audi 80 beating a Lexus ES250 and a Buick LeSabre. Today's challenge: Speedometers!

When we did the Junkyard Build Quality challenge with door panels, the Audi 80 won handily, with top-shelf fasteners, few hidden corners cut, and well-thought-out design. We're moving into sportier— and pricier— territory here, with a 1993 BMW E36 yielding its speedometer to Shawn's crude-yet-effective junkyard…

A Russian artist commissioned some gun aficionados to take aim at a art-museum-bound BMW 3-Series and draw pretty flowers with the bullet holes. They missed. A lot. Gallery of carnage below.

As always, there was no shortage of BMW E30s at the last LeMons race, but we also saw representatives of British Leyland, German subsidiaries of the Detroit Big Three, and a whole squadron of Saabs.

Remember the Eddie Griffin Wrecked Enzo? The carbon-fiber bumper from Eddie's Enzo now lives on as a performance-enhancing aerodynamic device on the Enzo Dysfunction BMW E36 at the 24 Hours Of LeMons Texas!

We thought the Mitsuoka Himiko was a clever re-envisioning of the Mazda MX-5. We do not feel the same way about the Russian-built, E-36-based Cardi Body II.