Desert Island Game - The 5 Best Upgrades For a Daily Driven BMW You Can’t Live Without

The other night, a friend and I were talking desert island lists. You know, where you can only bring X number of things to a desert island, what do you bring with you. This can apply to books, movies, survival gear, whatever the topic is, the point is to decide on what you couldn’t live without. When it comes to modifying cars, we tend to think in opposite terms. We want to do everything. The more we’ve done, the better the car, right? Well, no. In many cases, less is more, even with performance. In this edition of Turner Motorsport Weekly, we’re going to outline the modifications you should make if you could only make a few. This is our list of suggestions for getting the most out of your BMW with minimal changes.

We don’t want to say ‘OEM Plus’ when we’re talking about these modifications, either. We’re going to approach this with a goal in mind. If I want to make my daily driven BMW of relatively any model a better, more engaging, and sportier car, what are the things I absolutely have to do and how little can I get away with changing? Real desert island stuff. To put it in those terms, ‘If you could only change five things on your BMW, what would you change and why?’

SWAY BARS

While we love the way lowered BMWs look and find massive benefits with adjustable settings, the lowered suspension does tend to affect the ride. If we want a sportier feel from our daily driven BMW of choice, but don’t want to compromise ride quality in any way, sway bars are the way to go. It may sound odd to pick sway bars instead of springs or coilovers, but we want to keep in mind both budget and performance. Sway bars cost about as much as springs, except sway bars do much more to reduce body roll and improve traction through corners. They also generally include upgraded mounts and bushings, which satisfies a maintenance service as well. Yes, improved sway bars will be much more noticeable on a spirited run in your daily-driven BMW and will pair nicely with the other suggestions on this list to give you a highly engaging commuter without sacrificing usability or comfort.

WHEELS / TIRES

We’re counting this as one upgrade, but you can opt-out of changing your wheels. OEM BMW wheel styles are traditionally attractive, especially the motorsport options, so we completely understand someone who wants to either keep their OEM wheels or run a different set of OEM BMW wheels. Regardless, tires are the real kicker here. Tires do more for your driving experience than just about any single other modification. This makes sense, as tires are ultimately the things that connect your car to the road. The better the tire for the type of driving you intend to do, the better your car will perform. Or rather, the better you will be able to control your car and the more of its available potential you’ll be able to access. It all comes down to traction. If you have grippy tires and tons of traction, you’re going to be putting all of your BMW’s power to the ground rather than losing it to wheel spin or shedding too much speed in the corners.

Obviously, you’ll need to decide exactly what tires are right for the type of driving conditions you expect to regularly encounter. For a moderate climate, a good set of all-season tires can be fine, but you’ll find they don’t do any one thing well. We suggest a dedicated set of winter snow tires if you live in a climate that sees colder winters and a dedicated set of summer tires for the warmer months. You don’t have to run some track-oriented low treadwear tires, either. High-performance summer street tires will make a huge difference without shortening their lifespan too much.

PADS / ROTORS

Brakes do more than bring you to a stop in traffic or prevent you from hitting an obstacle. The efficiency of your brakes largely determines how quickly you can drive. Think of it this way; the longer you spend slowing down to take a corner, the less time you’re spending on the throttle. That also means you’re reducing the efficiency of your car, as it expends a lot of energy to come back up to speed. With the sway bars helping you maintain balance in the corner, and your grippy tires providing traction, the limiting factor becomes your brakes. Once again, this is a daily driven car. You don’t need to go buy the fanciest, biggest, mostest-piston brakes you can. All you need is a good set of pads and rotors that are designed to operate efficiently in the heat ranges you expect in normal and spirited driving.

Hawk Performance has a helpful chart that breaks down their different pad compounds and heat ranges, but you don’t have to go with Hawk. We love them, but there are plenty of high-performance braking companies out there who provide pads and rotors that will offer huge improvements over their stock counterparts. Regardless of what pads and rotors you choose, upgrading your brakes will make a tangible difference in how your car responds and behaves when you want to hit the back roads.

EXHAUST

Finally, something you can see and hear! We’ll admit, this isn’t the flashiest list of parts and likely not what many enthusiasts would choose if they only had to pick five upgrades. That said, it’s a list that promotes driving enjoyment and supplementing what your BMW did well from the factory rather than rewriting the whole book. Even so, as enthusiasts, we want to hear our engines. Nothing gets us going more than a hearty exhaust note. Since this is for a daily-driven build, we don’t want to go cutting out catalytic converters or opting for the loudest system possible, but we do want to hear our BMW and we want it to sound more aggressive. Some extra power would be nice, too.

A cat-back exhaust system, either valved or non-valved, is a highly gratifying upgrade. If I could make only one ‘power’ upgrade, I’d probably pick exhaust. It does free up a few horsepowers in most cases, but more importantly, it just changes the whole attitude of the car. When a car looks sporty but doesn’t make any noise, it just sort of feels like a flashy facade. With a hearty exhaust note and a little more volume, your BMW will sound as good as it looks. Of course, there are plenty of options to choose between and it does come down to what your preferred sound is. We like Supersprint for daily-driven BMWs thanks to their extremely high build quality and materials. They’re also not inherently as loud as many of the other cat-back systems on the market, so it’s something you can live with on a commute or road trip. That said, there are likely many systems to consider with your BMW and it will come down to what you like best.

SOFTWARE TUNE

Finally, the bow that ties it all together. Now, this won’t apply to nearly every BMW as the rest of this list does, but it will apply to most. Even back to the OBDI cars, chip tuning and piggyback software reflashes have been a popular way to maximize the power from even completely stock engines. An optimized map will help pull ‘hidden’ horsepower from your engine and provide a much-needed bump in fun when you put your foot down. For turbocharged cars particularly, there are tons of software upgrades like Burger Motorsports JB4 software, COBB software, and even our in-house developed Turner Motorsport software to pick up anywhere from 10 to 50 horsepower on an unmodified engine. Unfortunately, if you have a naturally aspirated BMW, that performance bump won’t be as much. However, we have an alternative for those of you who either don’t have software upgrades available off the shelf or would prefer a better tactile driving experience rather than a few extra horsepowers.

SHORT SHIFT KIT

If you fall into that category of drivers who want a better feel rather than more power, or you just don’t have any software options for your BMW, a short shift kit is the way to go. With manual transmission BMWs, the gear shifter is where much of what we’d call ‘driving feel’ comes from. A factory shifter can feel vague, unresponsive, and slow even in performance-oriented cars like BMWs. Upgrading that shifter with a shorter throw version and replacing rubber shifter bushings with stiffer polyurethane options will give you a faster and more rewarding row through the gears. Sportier shifting does drastically improve the connection you feel between you and your car and makes even normal commutes feel rewarding when you shift through the gears. If you had to switch out a software upgrade for a more engaging shifter, no one here would fault that decision.

WRAPPING UP

After all, this list is about improving your daily-driven BMW with as few changes as possible. The upgrades we mentioned here are focused on doing just that. If you had to pick five things to do to your BMW that would yield the biggest benefits for the lowest cost with the least sacrifice to ride quality and drivability, these are exactly the parts we’d suggest for any driver. Fortunately, we aren’t being shipped off to a deserted island and we don’t have to pick ‘just five’ upgrades, but if we did, these would be them. Whether you plan on simply improving your BMW for a bit more fun during your commute or starting from a good baseline of upgrades, this list is perfect for you!