FIRST DRIVES NEW CARS TESTED AND RATED

TESTED 9.3.23, ARIZONA, US ON SALE APRIL PRICE £64,745

If the outlandish XM plug-in hybrid SUV doesn’t do it for you, this very well might. But can M’s new baby live up to its magnificent predecessor?

For the petrolhead of realistic means, fresh metal doesn’t get much more enticing than a new M car. Especially one with a manual gearbox. Yes, there are the hardcore lightweights from Caterham et al, but special as they undoubtedly are, you can’t use them daily. A rearwheel-drive, tin-top coupé with a deep genetic predisposition for cornering antics, genuine refinement over distance, all the mod cons and back seats, though?

The second-generation BMW M2, successor to an irrefutable superstar, comfortably fits the description, and there’s lots to like about it. For one thing, it’s faster than you would ever need. It’s also a damn sight more attractive in the metal than in those leaked photos from last year, and it will oversteer for Deutschland.

But let’s put the champagne on ice for a moment, because there are caveats. Interrogate the tech spec and you will realise the ‘baby M car’ idea that BMW so memorably executed with the 1M Coupé of 2011 (which graduated into the best-selling M2 of 2015) is now dead and buried, killed by flab. The automatic car driven here weighs 1725kg (three pedals saves you 25kg), which is hard to compute because it means the M2 now weighs as much as the M4, whose platform it inherits. Put another way, the new M2 comes in exactly 150kg heavier than its usefully lithe forebear. It’s doubtful the original concept behind the M2 was for something crushing the scales 210kg more forcibly than a fat-hipped, PDKequipped, leather-lined Porsche 911 Carrera S, yet here we are.

Then there’s the price. Even when it went off sale in 2020, the old M2 Competition, if fitted with the dual-clutch gearbox, started at £53,000, yet this new car costs £65,000. Quite the jump. And sure, that’s not all down to BMW. In recent years, the business of building cars has become intensely expensive. There’s also the fact that the new 454bhp M2 is a more capable car than the old one, outgunning by 10bhp even the hardcore CS run-out special. Dirk Hacker, M’s chief engineer, describes the Nordschleife laptime delta between M2s new and old simply as ‘very big’. Trim is more generous: UK cars will get a 6kg-lighter carbonfibre roof as standard and adaptive dampers (the old M2 was passive). But still, £65,000. Or, funnily, £66,000 for a manual. The 4.0-litre Porsche 718 Cayman GTS costs as much, and that car is a certified four-wheeled work of art. You then need to consider that the new M2 is, on paper, basically an M4 on a slower, cheaper, purely rear-driven leash. The same but lesser in all matters – except mass, that is. In two-pedal form, both cars use the same ZF-built gearbox, even down to the ratios. Track widths are replicated to the millimetre (and are up about 35mm front and rear compared with the M240i). The staggered wheel and tyre package is identical except for the fact the M2 has a touch less sidewall. The M2 uses the same twinturbocharged straight-six S58 engine as its bigger brother, albeit detuned from 503bhp, ensuring daylight exists between the power-to-weight ratios. Suspension geometry is, to all intents and purposes, a mirror image. Same for brakes. Same for the strut hardware, subframes, breathing and cooling. We’re dealing with dizygotic twins here, which wasn’t the case with the old iterations.