My BMW is great for big miles, but cheap fuel uncovered an unusual flaw in the M2

A couple of longer journeys in the BMW M2 this month, heading from home in Cambridgeshire to as far west as the Llŷn peninsula, just below Anglesey in Wales, then a few days later trekking all the way back east and beyond, into the depths of Norfolk.

The M2 is an excellent long-distance machine, calm and relaxing at a motorway-speed cruise, to the point where you barely even think about the car you’re travelling in. (Actually, is that a good thing or a bad thing?) The spell is only broken by road surfaces with rough textures, which bring on some prominent tyre roar, or repeated expansion joints or seams, the thump-thump thump-thump from which are on the harsh side aurally. It’s a small price to pay for the performance you get elsewhere, though.

> BMW M2 (F87, 2015 - 2022) review – flawed then but from £20k it’s now fantastic value

Those fancy M Carbon bucket seats remain remarkably comfortable on a long run too, supporting you in all the right places and keeping fidgeting at bay, which is a good job because they don’t give you much wriggle room anyway.

When the speeds drop, you do notice the M2’s low-speed ride, which even in Comfort mode jiggles and jars on bumpier roads and over north Wales’ endless bloody speed bumps. The more weather-ravaged surfaces also unleashed a new rattle from somewhere in the driver’s door, to add to the one coming from the driver’s seat-back (squeezing the top corner of the seat over your right shoulder silences that one for a while).

Being forced to fill up with regular unleaded instead of super for a couple tanks revealed a slight reluctance from the straight-six to work at lower revs when pulling away or when trying to use the very bottom end of third gear instead of slotting second. The latter is largely laziness on my part, though, and elsewhere in the range any differences were harder to detect. An average cruising mpg approaching the mid-30s seems respectable given the 454bhp potential, too.

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The built-in satnav also got a pretty good workout and proved to be one of the better manufacturer systems I’ve used of late. The big central screen for the map is helpful, as are the depictions of upcoming junctions in the head-up display when the route gets fiddly. Their heightened prominence at night can be a bit distracting, mind, but they’re easily switched off.

All said and done, this month provided confirmation of the new M2’s all-rounder credentials, which makes me wonder why I haven’t seen more out there. So far I’ve only spotted one other in the wild, and closer inspection revealed that it too was a press car. Where are you all hiding, G87 owners?

This story was first featured in evo issue 324.

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