I too am not a fan of auto cars and tend to avoid them like the plague wherever possible. However the hire car company, not having the manual 3 series I’d requested last year gave me an automatic 330d Touring xDrive instead for my 2 week work trip.
My daily drive is an RS4 and I love to press on wherever possible but must say I was really impressed with the 330d, lovely sounding 6cyl engine, never dropped below 40mpg despite some very hard driving and a huge amount of mid range and overtaking grunt. And the auto box in this was way better than anything I’ve driven before, much more responsive, didn’t hunt around for gears and seemed to know what I wanted from it without using the paddles.
Heard you can chip these to silly numbers, or there’s also the 335d which should be very rapid indeed. As a petrolhead I’ll still hold out for manual for as long as possible but I was still tempted by an automatic diesel – go figure???