Making their way around the internet after a German magazine broke the embargo on their release, are a number of images of BMW’s new E93 M3 Cabriolet. Not due to be officially unveiled until the Geneva Auto Salon in March of this year we are able to give you a bit of look see at the “not so serious version” of BMW’s bitumen brawler.

I’ve always found it hard to take drop top performance cars seriously and in the case of the roofless M3 the penalty for the added pose is believed to be a whopping 230kgs of added weight, which is some serious porking up. It’s there in the form of additional strengthening and of course a folding hardtop and mechanism.

The big news with the M3 Cabriolet, is that BMW will also be debuting their much anticipated seven-speed dual clutch replacement for the SMG transmission, which it is believed will be made available across the E90, E92 and E93 range. BMW are calling it the M-DKG (or possibly the M-DCT) and new M3 Cabriolet owners are likely to prefer it over the popular but imperfect sequential manual gearbox that it replaces.

Wheel mounted paddle shifters will mean owners can keep one hand on the wheel and the other on their hat, as they slingshot past their favourite Toorak café, with the M-DKG even blipping the throttle for them.

Despite the weight gain the E93 BMW M3 equipped with the M-DKG is believed to take care of the 0-100km/h dash in 5.3 seconds, but I stress that this is not an official time and there is certainly some debate concerning this figure over at M3post.

[Source: M3post via Autoblog]

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