BMW M2 Fast Fleet test – daily driving the cut-price 'M4 Lite'

The G87 BMW M2 is the ideal evo daily driver on paper. With almost 500bhp from a 3-litre straight-six, drive to the rear wheels alone and the option of a manual transmission, there's not much that can match it in 2025. To find out if it can perform day-to-day, we're living with one.

YF23 VTT’s spec has ‘evo’ written all over it, with a manual gearbox, carbonfibre-shelled bucket seats and a nice bright paint colour to help it stand out on the printed page and keep photographers happy. The good news is that Toronto Red metallic is a zero-cost choice. Slightly less good is that the manual ’box will set you back an additional £1200 over the auto, although we should probably just be grateful that a manual option exists at all. Thank you, BMW.

> BMW M5 CS Fast Fleet test – 9000 miles in the eCoty-winning supersaloon

And then we get to the not-so-small matter of those seats. Having experienced them in various M3s, 4s and 5s, it’s fair to say we’re fans. No, they’re not the easiest to get into or out of (I find a supporting hand on the sill helps when exiting) but those high bolsters also make them brilliantly supportive, while at the same time they are also remarkably comfortable seats on long journeys. And yes, they look cool too. The catch is the cost. To get them on the M2 you need to spec the M Race Track Package, which is £9095 and buys said seats, a top speed increase to 180mph and a voucher for an M driver training experience. Expensive chairs, then. Trouble is, while the standard M Sport seats are perfectly fine, once you’ve tried the M Carbon buckets, it’s hard to imagine going back.

Also present on our car is a Comfort Package (£730 for keyless access, a heated steering wheel and a wireless charging tray), taking the total to £76,855, up from £65,830 basic in pre-facelift form. For reference, that with-options figure still undercut the starting price of a rear-drive M4 Competition by six grand.

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There’s been a fair bit of talk about this latest generation of M2 feeling more ‘grown up’ and this certainly dominates your first impressions. Partly this comes from its size (exactly the same width as an M4 in the body, 13mm narrower at the mirror tips), partly from its kit levels, including standard adaptive dampers (the old M2 and M2 Competition ran a passive set-up) and the mahoosive screens in the cabin. Said displays look almost comically large at first, the central touchscreen ending somewhere above where your passenger’s right knee would be, but after a while they start to make sense. Everything on them is larger, so they’re easier to read at a glance, and to operate on the move too, because your index finger always has a larger target to aim for. This goes a long way towards mitigating the general shortage of physical buttons, and soon it’s the screens in other cars that begin to look absurdly small. (I feel the same about the thickness of M’s steering wheel rims too, but I’m aware that myself and Herr Lenkraddesigner at BMW are in a minority of two on this front.)

And to drive? Ah… Before I could really start enjoying our M2, and before we put it into that twin test with the A45 for that matter, there was one small job that needed taking care of. Something about our M2’s handling seemed a little bit ‘off’. Positioning the car on the road with precision always felt just out of reach, especially when the road surface was uneven, and there was a slight but distracting waywardness here and there. A wheel alignment seemed in order, which in turn uncovered that geometry is something of a talking point among G87 owners in certain territories. More about that next time.

This story was first featured in evo issue 321.