I don’t quite know what to make of this BMW M2. Usually, with any latest M car, there are songs of praise written and each one of them ends up being called the latest and the greatest in the company’s long list of performance cars. I’m not sure if the M2 is that. It is the latest, undoubtedly. But is it the greatest? I don’t think so. I’ve driven my fair share of BMW Ms but I’ve never, incidentally, driven its two baby cars that have quite a following. The 1M and the first generation F87 M2.
So, when I went to pick this one up, I had a completely blank slate to work with. I sat down for a round of coffee with another journalist friend and we ended up discussing the M2 among several other random things. And we both agreed on one thing — the M2 looks quite odd.
What I mean is that it’s over-styled. I’m pretty sure there’s a great harmony between form and function and the designers were chasing the most optimum aero and packaging balance, but come on — this won’t be called pretty in any universe! And I’ve looked at it a lot, from all the angles possible and then waited a while before looking at it again, and again, and again. I thought maybe it’ll grow on me, but it hasn’t. Not even a bit.
I think the front end is too blunt for its own good and doesn’t give a friendly vibe. The square inlets at the corners are ungainly and exaggerated and there’s just no sense of cohesion to the design. The bonnet has a nice and strong bulge down the middle and there’s the S58 straight-six engine underneath that sheet of metal. More on that as we go along; right now, let’s get done with the ridiculous design details.
If you look at the M2 from the side, especially when sitting low, you’ll notice that the rear end has a stupidly protruding stance. That’s a great eye sore. And the rear view is hardly anything to talk about either. I mean we could talk about it, but it’ll not be great words championing the looks, so let’s just skip that. The whole car — it seems like there’s no harmony in design.
But thankfully the interior is a totally different deal. There’s the smart updated BMW look in the cabin — signed off, particularly by the single-piece glass slab that’s the infotainment screen. The other bits in the cabin are also quite good — the quality of materials used is high and everything feels robust in here. I absolutely love the seats. Firstly, they look fantastic with this M colour theme going on and they are also fairly comfortable. They could’ve been very slightly more supportive along the sides but that’s a small bargain that I can live with.
Remarkably, BMW India chose to bring in the media unit in a spec that’s not all-bells-and-whistles. There’s an option of choosing carbon bucket seats; they’d have been slightly lighter, thinner and more skeletal. This means that the M2 would’ve been marginally lighter, there’d been marginally more space at the rear and the driver would be able to feel the road marginally more.
The rear seats — and I did get in the back — are really, only meant for small humans. If you are tall-ish and were to try sitting in the back, and even if the front passenger was kind enough to allow your knee a little margin of freedom from the back of the front seat’s frame, the tapering roofline would ensure that you’d pay a visit to your chiropractor to snap your neck back in position. Although the seat cushioning is fine, just because of the lack of space, it’s not a comfortable place to be.
Features — you get what has become a basic inclusion in the connectivity suite: CarPlay and Android Auto. Then there are other safety and driver assist systems like Park Distance Control, Cruise Control, Front Collision Warning, Lane Departure Warning, Head-Up display etc. It also gets stuff like a drift analyser — the fun thing which will make you giggle and go attempt after attempt at setting huge slides. We didn’t do slides; sadly — the public roads didn’t allow that, but maybe when we get the car on a track, we’d go smoking the rears.
And now — the main question that people will ask in excitement, expecting fireworks of an answer because it’s an M2: How is it to drive?
See, the baby M cars have always borrowed some chassis components from their bigger siblings. The 1M had the suspension architecture from the E90 3 Series and the first-gen M2 was suspended on the F80 M3‘s assembly. This new G87 M2 takes in a lot of stuff from the current generation M3 and M4. It borrows the subframes from the M4 and all of the suspension links and architecture is similar to the bigger M.
It is about 4 inches shorter than the M4 and only very slightly lighter. That means, it is a heavy car for its footprint — a bit over 1700 kilograms. And that does get highlighted when you get playful with the throttle. The setup feels quite unlike a strong M car. If you’ve driven M cars, you’d love them for their inherent oversteer-y nature. This one doesn’t feel that way. It feels a bit opposite in fact. It feels like the front is pushing on instead of the rear stepping out on a whim. And that’s where a lot of mental debate goes on — because it’s a great thing from the driving dynamics point of view, but also a bit lame at the same time.
It’s great because of the approachability and adjustability of the car on rude inputs. For a big chunk of prospective buyers who are not going to drive at 9/10th or 10/10ths, it’s the obedience of the chassis that’ll make them feel good about themselves for going around bends doing speeds that they’d mostly only imagined in their head or achieved on a gaming console.
I remember the M4 being a proper weapon. There’s a sense of innocent playfulness at half-throttle driving, while it becomes an absolute beast… over revving its rears in smoke when applied with the full force of its engine. But there was always a sense of fluidity to it; it didn’t feel edgy.
I think because the M2 rides on the suspension from the M4, the combination of that in a short wheelbase format would’ve been far too extreme, so the chassis tuning guys at M increased the spring rate at the front and softened up the rear to give it a more balanced dynamic range favouring high-speed stability. As a result of that the rear yields more mechanical grip as the car oscillates to maintain contact with the road underneath. The adaptive damper helps with the ride and the M2 never felt like it would bottom out even with three adults on board. But while the suspension doesn’t feel aggressive and the ride is okay, the rest of the driving experience is surprisingly middle of the road.
The M2 is best experienced in the default sport mode, or you can set your inputs in the M1 and M2 preset buttons on the steering wheel. Speaking of steering … When going about at low speeds, the off-centre feel in the steering is nonexistent and as you start taking the engine towards its redline and get to serious speeds, it feels unnecessarily pointy. I guess it’s also to do with the road surfacing — the Tarmac levelling wasn’t the best and the M2 felt nervous when applied with a heavy dose of throttle and the wavy roads make it skip lanes. So, yeah, a bit disconcerting, surely!
I also think the amount of rubber it drives on is just hilarious! There’s so much section at the front that you’ll need to muscle the car into stepping out. The Pirelli P Zero 4s at the front are 275/35 on 19-inch wheels and the rears are 285/30 on 20 inches. That’s just crazy in such a small car.
The S58 engine in the M2 is the same as the one in the M4; it only runs a slightly lower boost pressure to produce 460 horsepower and 550Nm that is delivered to the rear wheels through an M differential working off a clutch pack. The engine features the M TwinPower Turbo technology — which means it has two mono-scroll turbochargers. One supplies compressed air to cylinders 1 to 3 and the other feeds cylinders 4 to 6.
The car also gets a big array of electromechanical systems, brake-by-wire is one element of it, and there’s also a 10-stage traction control system. The M2 has two transmission options: a ZF 8-speed automatic and the other is the 6-speed manual that we are driving. Typically, a manual gearbox in a performance car is the best recipe for maximum driving pleasure. It activates and works all your senses. It’s what enthusiasts have always wanted. The M2 stick shift experience is not as great as Porsche’s.
I drove a manual last-gen 718 Cayman a few months back and it was sheer joy. The shift action through the gate felt like gliding your hand through a stream of water with a very satisfying well-slotted finish at the end of every cog.
The manual in the M2 feels a bit lacking in comparison. The shift action sometimes feels a bit rubbery and lacks clarity. It is a very good short throw ‘box and the senses are heightened, no doubt; but is it as good as the Porsche? Not quite. But because the engine is very strong in torque supply, BMW has geared the M2 slightly taller and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th gears are very flexible in managing the power and building speeds through the revs.
Any car with a huge amount of power has to contend with vague vibrations. To counter that, the M2 makes use of 3 strut braces in the engine bay and a shearing plate underneath the rear subframe. All of this contributes to a stretched dynamic capability because it isolates the vibrations and makes the car feel more settled.
The steering, the suspension, the gearbox — they lack the tactility that you want from a package like this. The car must speak to you so that you can feel it through the skin. The M2 doesn’t have that quality. It’s bloody fast, no doubt. And it’s great in parts. But as a sum of all the parts, it’s not quite there. It should’ve felt fluid like the Cayman does.
In its current form, BMW has tried to make the M2 do a lot of things well to appeal to a wide set of people. And that’s where it has gone wrong. The 1M and the first-gen M2 had a focus on singularity that made them great. This M2 is perhaps the final act, the last episode if you will, of a powerful straight six engine, mated to a manual gearbox in a small sports car construction. It should’ve been better than what it is. It should’ve been memorable. But it’s not!