• 50,300 miles from new
• Recently refreshed to restore exterior condition
• Hardtop with rack included plus wind deflector
• Private plate not included

When a car becomes the default choice in any category, you know it has to be something special. That certainly applies to the BMW M3.

Across six generations, the M3 has been the car you turn to if you want a high performance, D-segment car, and there's a good case for the E46 – like the one you see here – to be the best-regarded of them all.

This M3 Convertible first hit the roads in December 2003, and it seems to have lived a rather charmed life for much of that time. It's only covered just over 50,000 miles since then; that's an average of about 3,000 a year, but even in its early days it was only covering roughly 6,000 miles a year.

It's been through the hands of seven other owners before it arrived at its current home in October 2020, though the seller understands that some of the owners were related – a car loved enough that family members bought it from each other!

The current owner picked it up between lockdowns last year as a nostalgia trip. He'd previously owned another E46 M3 back when it was new, and felt the need to revisit that experience.

Over the last few months the car has also been refreshed inside and out, to remove various small marks and blemishes it's picked up over the past 17 years and cure most of its niggles

However it's proven to be a little too much and a bit too frantic a car for the rutted country lanes near his house, so he's looking to move it on to a new home.

There's a good-sized paperwork folder for the M3, covering invoices and receipts over its life on the UK's roads – even including bills for tyres – coming it at 15-20 pages in total. This paperwork also backs up the mileage. That also includes old MOTs too.

An HPI certificate from 2011 certifies the car's mileage, and the service book covers the early part of the M3's life; like other recent cars from the brand, BMW keeps an electronic record of vehicle servicing.

It was a bold choice of the original owner to specify an Imola Red interior, but it certainly adds a splash of colour to the cabin; BMWs can sometimes be a bit dingy on the inside and that's not something you can level at this M3.

All four seats, both door cards, and the rear cabin trim all feature this scarlet finish, and it's in excellent condition throughout. As you'd expect, there's a few lines and creases on the driver's seat, but no damage that we can see, and the other three seats appear to have been rarely used – if ever, in the case of the rears. Any rear-seat occupants though would have been treated to infotainment systems in the front seat headrests.

The rest of the cabin is also in good condition, from the carpets to the fabric roof, and almost all of the various electronic gadgets are in full working order. However the owner has flagged up a fault with the navigation system; he was planning on replacing the entire infotainment system with a modern Android Auto/Apple CarPlay unit to bypass the fault had he kept the car.

While the soft top does impact on the boot space a little compared to the coupe model, it's still a good-sized boot and it's in as good a condition as the rest of the car. There's also a DVD disc-changer hiding back there.

When the seller picked the M3 up originally, it had a few dings and blemishes in the steel grey paint, but they've made sure all have been addressed – right down to replacing the indicator units – to bring it back into a healthy condition.

As you'd expect then, it's remarkably clean all round and looks more like a car kept in storage than one that's 17 years old. The paintwork is as good as we've seen, and everything down to even the badges is gleaming.

That includes the four, ten-spoke alloy wheels, which you'll often find kerbed on these cars. The folding fabric roof also looks to be in great condition, with no marks of any kind, and the electronic folding function is fully operational. The car also comes with a matching color hard top and rack, stand and wind deflector plus case.

For those of you who aren't fans of the M Sport colours in the grille – and it is a divisive modification – it's just three plastic covers for the existing vanes and easily removed!

With just 50,000 miles under its wheels, this M3 is still pretty young in mechanical terms and there's no concerns about it in any respect. The 3.2-litre straight-six is still as powerful as you could need, with 340hp, and it's paired to the second-generation of SMG automatic which provides rapid shifts up through the six gears.

Everything works just as it ought, with the seller describing it as a “rocket”, and although the pretty stiff suspension is proving a bit too tough to live with in rural surroundings it is exactly as BMW intended it to be.

The M3 has always been one of the best regarded performance cars for good reason. Everything comes together – sound, looks, handling, and power – to make for a great experience.

Add in the convertible roof and the fact that this one has relatively few miles and plenty of work to keep it in top condition and you've got an excellent example of a legendary machine.