This BMW M3 CSL Has Been Sitting in a Car Park for 20 Years, Got Clamped Twice

It was August 4, 2004, when a businessman reportedly took a trip from London to Reading to pick up the brand-new BMW E46 M3 CSL that he had ordered several months before. It should have been a day of joy, followed by many others, in the company of a car like no other. But he drove it back to London, putting 37 miles on the clock, parked it in a monitored underground car park in London, and then totally forgot about it.

The car has been sitting there since the very day the owner took it from the Reading dealership. And according to the Facebook post that made it famous, it has never gone through the MOT, which is a compulsory annual test for safety, overall road worthiness, and emissions of motor vehicles, required by the British Ministry of Transport.

It has not undergone any other kind of test, for that matter, does not have a valid insurance, and has not seen the light of day since August 2004, the moment it was parked there for the first and last time. So it is probably one of the lowest mileage CSLs from the 2000s still in existence.

Users seeing the post on social media claim the car is in a car park in Peckham, a district in south London. The BMW got clamped twice for sitting there for too long. But nobody has ever asked for unclamping, and nobody paid any fine.

The car is not in the greatest of conditions after just sitting there for two decades. There are a few dents and bents here and there, and the driver's mirror looks scratched, probably by drivers failing to get in the nearby parking spots properly and went way too close to it.

There was presumably a bizarre owner change in 2013. But the new owner has never moved the car either. According to the Facebook post (embedded below), a 2004 tax disc has recently been removed from the window to hide the numbers.

What is the exact story behind this BMW abandoned in a car park in London is hard to tell. But what we do know is that an E46 M3 CSL is not a car that you get delivered and then forget about. The sports car came with a naturally-aspirated inline-six rated at 355 horsepower (360 PS) and 272 lb-ft (370 Nm). These figures were enough for the BMW to hit 62 mph (100 kph) from zero in 4.9 seconds. The needle of the odometer went all the way to 155 mph (250 kph).