Is a BMW M2 an M4 on a budget? We daily drive one to find out

My suspicion proved to be correct: our M2’s wheel alignment was indeed ‘out’. Confirmation came from my local German and performance car specialist, Gem Tech in Cambridgeshire, where owner Jeremy found a marked mismatch side-to-side, particularly in the toe angles, at both ends of the car.

How it came to be like this is unclear. There is some grumbling online about G87s arriving with less-than-optimum geometry, but this is mostly from customers in America who had a BMW USA-approved height-adjustable suspension kit fitted when their car landed in the States (or ‘port installed’ as it’s called). Such suspension isn’t even an option in Europe, so that’s not the problem here. I’d like to think YF23 VTT left the factory as intended; I’d also like to think that those who covered the first 6000 miles in it, before evo took delivery, would have noticed something was amiss if it hadn’t. A mystery, then.

> The BMW M3 is going electric next year, but it sounds like a V10

Still, it’s sorted now – back to factory spec and with the steering-angle sensor recalibrated accordingly – which means we’ve been able to enjoy the car as M intended. (And for the avoidance of doubt, the alignment was corrected before­ we entered our M2 into the twin test with Mercedes-AMG’s A45 S in issue 320.)

That said, there is one further hurdle to enjoying the M2: the infernal lane-keep assist system. I know, I know… it’s the law for cars homologated after mid-2022, so BMW has no choice but to have it. But did the option to turn it off have to be buried so deep in the iDrive menus that it takes seven touchscreen taps to disable it every single time you start the engine? Seven! Plus a couple more to then get back to the infotainment display you really want. And inevitably you forget to do this until after you’ve moved off, so you end up fumbling around with a touchscreen when you should be concentrating on driving. And this makes the car safer how exactly?

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Thankfully some clever individual on the Bimmerpost forums has devised a cunning solution that takes advantage of iDrive’s retention of a physical click-wheel controller. If you save the lane-keep assist option in the first iDrive shortcut then all you need to do is tilt the controller forward (a less well-known way to call up the shortcuts on the touchscreen) then push it down twice (to untick the option and confirm). All done in a second, and crucially without needing to take your eyes off the road. Sanity restored.

And with it came an interesting discovery. I’d spent a couple of weeks with our M4 Competition xDrive long-termer shortly before switching to the M2, and much as I liked the M4 – really liked it – I’ve found myself wanting to drive the M2 more. Why so? Because it seems better suited to the kind of tight and twisty B-roads I like to drive on. It may not be narrower than the M4, but it is shorter overall, including in the wheelbase, which must benefit agility in sharper corners. It’s also 75kg lighter, although I may be kidding myself that I can notice that difference in a car weighing 1700kg. I’ve a theory that its outputs feel better suited too: with 454bhp and 406lb ft, the M2 is still extremely well endowed, make no mistake, but perhaps the M4’s extra 49bhp and 73lb ft make it harder to fully extend at times and so turn it into more of a ‘big roads’ sort of car.

This story was first featured in evo issue 322.