A Slender Build Is No Guarantee You’ll Fit Comfortably In The BMW M3 Competition’s Carbon-Fiber Bucket Seats

The BMW M3 and M4 now come with massive grilles that don’t exactly match the rest of the car, but they’ve also become infamous for their optional carbon-fiber bucket seats. I don’t believe for a second that anyone who plans to drive their new M3 with any regularity actually orders these seats, and I’m pretty sure you mostly hear about them because the BMW USA PR team loves adding them to their press cars. Still, there’s no denying they’re a full step past “aggressive.” In addition to the extreme bolstering and limited padding you’d probably expect from a set of carbon fiber buckets, BMW also added a crotch cradle that almost everyone who’s experienced the seats agrees was a step too far. 

That said, a lot of auto journalists are America-sized, which naturally raises the question: Do they only hate them because of their size? A year and a half ago, I couldn’t have told you, but through a still patent-pending combination of cleaning up my diet, cutting back on, then later completely giving up alcohol and a little chronic illness, I’m now officially Europe-sized again. Even so, I’m still close to being too wide for the bolsters, and there isn’t much I could do about it short of getting some sort of ribcage-narrowing surgery. 

I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but surely, you can get whatever you want if you throw enough money around, right? I mean, they already do leg lengthening surgeries, so it isn’t the biggest stretch in the world.

Thankfully, my health has started to take a positive turn recently, so I really don’t want you worrying about that, but dropping all that weight so fast also means I have little to no padding left in my buttocks region. That’s great for fitting into jeans I hadn’t worn in about seven years, but it isn’t so great for sitting comfortably on hard surfaces such as benches, bar stools or carbon fiber bucket seats. BMW didn’t go so hardcore with its seats that I started to hate my five-hour drive to the Mini John Cooper Works launch, but it did make me wish I’d provided more of my own padding. 

On the plus side, though, with a butt and thighs that only Hank Hill could ever be jealous of, the sack separater that so many people complain about wasn’t a problem at all. I won’t go as far as to say I loved it, but if you’re built like you suffer from a Victorian wasting disease, at least it doesn’t get in the way. Then again, were I to have taken the M3 to the track, I’d need much thicker thighs to reap the supposed benefits of the bulge-bulge. 

There’s also plenty of room for big butts, so if you do happen to have thick thighs and a copious caboose while also somehow not having an ounce of meat on your ribs, you probably have the ideal body for those seats. If you aren’t built like a Pixar mom, though, you’ll just need to do what I’m pretty sure 99.999% of M3 buyers have also done, and simply stick with the regular sport seats. 

Oh, and go for the manual on the non-Comp M3, too, not for the nostalgia but because the automatic is jerky as hell.