And relax. Enjoy the respite. You’ve certainly earned it.
BMW-land has of late been an exhausting kaleidoscope of odd contours, oversized grilles, transverse engines, endless crossovers, mass, girth and, although it’s quite understandable, widespread electrification and the compromises that brings. Buy an iX and you get the full house. It’s a BMW, but it’s not a BMW. Do they even make those any more, for those of us who can’t stretch to an M5 CS?
Turns out they do. One look at the new G42-gen BMW 2 Series Coupé’s monolithic bonnet tells you that not only does this car possess an engine but also it’s set lengthways rather than sideways. And the car is therefore natively rear driven.
Elsewhere, the silhouette is clean, the kidneys are right-sized, and there is of course the two-door form, which feels an increasingly rare thing in today’s world. It’s no exaggeration to say that all of this comes as an enormous relief, because for a while there, we thought the understated non-M driver’s Beemer was lost to us.
To explain: in 2019, eyebrows were raised following the decision to move the rear-driven BMW 1 Series hatchback onto a front-drive platform. A year later, that discomfort morphed into a distinct jitteriness when the BMW 2 Series Gran Coupé arrived with the same underpinnings. And with the subsequent announcement of the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer MPV, things looked grim.
It seemed the two-door Coupé could be about to follow suit and ditch the layout of Ferrari, Aston Martin and almost every great BMW for one favoured by modern Volkswagen and Vauxhall. And make no mistake: for the last outpost of affordable, thoroughbred BMW-ness (because, let’s face it, the gawky BMW 4 Series is no longer that car), it would be better to just kill the 2 Series Coupé off. And the worst thing? Had that happened, nobody would have been that surprised.
So, welcome to the respite. In this instance, it comes in the form of the £45,795 M240i xDrive – the top-billing 2 Series until the BMW M2 arrives later this year as M division’s 50th birthday present to itself.
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Firstly, I read the article I'm interested in, I'm not critical of how an article is written, I couldn't do a job where you have a deadline to produce an article in a set amount of words to fit into a page,second, if I don't agree with the article I say so in.and I try to be fair, not easy, an unbiased way, and it was said to me when I was young, don't make statements you can't back up, so, if anyone fancies writing an article or two.
Wow, that CLA cabin, truly hideous. Bright, brash, zero subtlety. Designed by a teenager perhaps?
I just can't warm to the new 2 series looks - the previous one looked great.
After many years it looked like BMW was finally getting rid of the Chris Bungle influence, but they've gone all ugly and stupid looking again.