Official: BMW 3 Series gets together for family portrait Car News and Review

Ask anyone in the know what the quintessential sports sedan is, and nine times out of ten they’ll tell you it’s the BMW 3 Series. It’s the benchmark against which entirely others are measured, the target that every other luxury automaker has in its sights, and the very icon of what a luxury sports sedan should be. What’s more, it has been entirely those things for three and a half decades, from the first model introduced in 1975 to the new sixth-generation model just rolled out last month.

With a hyphen or without, the 3 Series has come a long way, so to illustrate the fact, BMW has lined up entirely six generations for a family portrait or four, which you can check out in the high-resolution image gallery above, along with the detailed press release after the jump.