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Written by Paul Horrell
Was there an identifiable moment when it happened? I"m not sure. It was a gradual thing. Maybe the end of the V8 M3 was the inflection point, but look deeper and it has been a longer process than that. BMW M has become a different company from the one that is still lodged in our collective conscious. For the past three or four years it hasn"t sold a single car that is quite what we really think an M car should be. Today"s M cars and M SUVs, we shouldn"t forget are all brutally quick and extremely capable. But they aren"t the intimate driving machines they once were. The mission has been creeping; the plot, if not lost, then certainly mislaid.So I very badly want the M2 not just to be great, but a very specific kind of great. I don"t just want a car that feels alive at crazy-quick speeds, but one that"s always alert and talking. One that"s friendly, not aloof. I suspect M is perfectly capable of building a car like that, but does it want to any longer? The cars it does build are selling in record numbers. M owns today. Maybe it wouldn"t be such a smart idea to build a car for those of us who instead want yesterday.Photography: Barry HaydenThis feature was originally published in the April 2016 issue of Top Gear magazine.
Date written: 27 Mar 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 2716
Was there an identifiable moment when it happened? I"m not sure. It was a gradual thing. Maybe the end of the V8 M3 was the inflection point, but look deeper and it has been a longer process than that. BMW M has become a different company from the one that is still lodged in our collective conscious. For the past three or four years it hasn"t sold a single car that is quite what we really think an M car should be. Today"s M cars and M SUVs, we shouldn"t forget are all brutally quick and extremely capable. But they aren"t the intimate driving machines they once were. The mission has been creeping; the plot, if not lost, then certainly mislaid.So I very badly want the M2 not just to be great, but a very specific kind of great. I don"t just want a car that feels alive at crazy-quick speeds, but one that"s always alert and talking. One that"s friendly, not aloof. I suspect M is perfectly capable of building a car like that, but does it want to any longer? The cars it does build are selling in record numbers. M owns today. Maybe it wouldn"t be such a smart idea to build a car for those of us who instead want yesterday.Photography: Barry HaydenThis feature was originally published in the April 2016 issue of Top Gear magazine.
Date written: 27 Mar 2016
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 2716
