BMW 2 Series Gran Coupe 2020 Review – International

Front-drive is in Munich to stay. Exclusively driven front wheels have arrived at BMW and they’re not going anywhere. It started with the last year’s 1 Series hatch and now it continues with the 2 Series Gran Coupe (sedan).

Confusingly, the harder-core 2 Series performance coupes, like the M2 Competition and the M2 CS, remain on their rear-drive layouts, but the 2 Series Gran Coupe has moved on to the 1 Series architecture, which is also shared with contemporary MINIs.

And it’s good. It’s very good.

It’s weird how good it is, because anybody involved with the stuff under the skin so clearly did a better job of the people in charge of cladding it. It takes a mental reset to allow you to believe it’s as good as it is.

For starters, the BMW M235i isn’t precisely front-wheel drive, but it’s a front-wheel drive with a hang-on differential on the rear, so it can switch any front-end slip to rear-wheel drive at will.

Even then, its front-wheel drive bits aren’t normal front-wheel drive bits, with the road grabbed by a mechanical Torsen limited-slip differential, which is the sort of thing normally reserved for far more expensive sporty cars.

BMW didn’t have the other Australia-bound 2 Series Gran Coupe (the 218i) on offer, instead only adding a 220d as its front-drive machine for us to test at the international.

There’s plenty of firepower sitting crossways under the bonnet, with $69,990 (plus on-road costs) buying a 225kW, 450Nm 2.0-litre turbo-petrol engine, which is claimed to be enough to swoop to 100km/h in 4.9 seconds.

It’s a big jump from the 218i’s $47,990 list price (plus on-road costs), and it’s also a big performance jump over its 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbo-petrol motor’s 103kW/220Nm (nearly four seconds slower to 100km/h than its big brother).

It also steps straight over the entry Gran Coupe’s seven-speed dual-clutch auto in favour of an eight-speed automatic, stiffened up for faster shifting. In fact, the entire M235i Gran Coupe xDrive powertrain neatly echoes the one in the M135i hatchback.

It straddles the gap between the 1 and 3 Series, with 4526mm of overall length, 1800mm of width and it’s 1420mm high, with 430 litres of boot space, plus a cubby hole under the cargo floor and a 40:20:40 split-fold rear seat.

Its 2670mm wheelbase effectively means it’s just 50mm shorter between its axles than the E46 3 Series.

The BMW 2 Series Gran Coupe has an outside, yes, but the less said about it, the better. There are trick LED headlights and thin tail-lights that work better in real life than they ever looked in studio images, but it’s not a pretty car.

The interior is a different story. It’s pretty neat, comfortable and well thought through. For a relatively young market, the M235i Gran Coupe feels remarkably mature inside, with very little overlooked.

Even the poverty pack delivers a 10.25-inch digital instrument cluster, a head-up display, another 10.25-inch screen for the touch-operated multimedia screen, ambient lighting throughout the interior, six speakers and wireless phone charging.

The base assistant package includes a reversing camera, front and rear parking sensors, lane-departure warning, autonomous emergency braking, rear cross-traffic alert and speed-sign recognition.

You get much more inside and out attached to the big engine, including a 16-speaker Harmon-Kardon sound system, leather upholstery, electric seats, adaptive LED headlights, keyless entry and bigger 19-inch rubber.

The front seats are immensely comfortable places to be, and the seating position is excellent, as is front visibility. The smartphone inductive charging pad is tilted and rubberised to resist moderate cornering forces.

The multimedia systems are much more intuitive than the Mercedes-Benz system (though less pretty) and there is plenty of storage inside, including three USB ports.

It’s even set up for over-the-air updates for its multimedia software and its Android Auto and Apple CarPlay navigation info can even be sent to its head-up display.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t begin at the engine, but at the delivery system for the engine.

One of its biggest tricks comes from the electric BMW i3, which needed a near-actuator wheel-slip limiter to govern all of its torque. The junior M car uses the same system to control wheelspin, with its slip controller mounted inside the engine’s control unit, and not in the skid-control computer.

BMW insists this makes its responses three times quicker, while feeling 10 times quicker, which means most drivers won’t even feel it intervening on their behalf to stop out-of-control moments before they even start to feel frightened.

The Torsen diff is a high-end thing, too, and the all-wheel drive system can send half of the engine/transmission’s torque to the rear-end when it needs to.

That’s a lot of flexibility in a little car and runs the risk of confusing the driver, but it doesn’t.

There’s the strength of the engine, of course, with its 450Nm of peak torque available from 1750rpm until 4500rpm, then the power peaks just 500 revs later, at 5000rpm, and stays on station until 6250rpm.

Even with all of this urge, BMW claims it’s good for 6.7L/100km, or 153 grams of CO2 per kilometre.

Very, very well. From the frameless doors to the fat-rimmed steering wheel, the BMW M235i Gran Coupe subtly tells its story as a crisp tourer, rather than an M2-style blaster, and it proves it with every corner.

The engine is quiet when it’s cruising and frenetic when it’s not. Yet it’s never uncivilised, and its performance is like being mashed to a leather wall and held there, calmly.

Overtaking is simple, cruising is simple, gearshifting is simple and driving fast or slow is just, well, simple. It’s an easy powertrain to live with and it hardly matters that there are faster cars in or near the class.

The trick stuff comes with corners. It does everything with a dignity and aplomb that’s utterly unexpected. There aren’t many cars this size with this sort of engine capacity that will cover ground with a combination of the M235i’s pace and grace.

Its body control is brilliant, even in the most comfortable of its three damper stiffness settings. Likewise, it never falls into the usual BMW overly hard ride in its Sport mode. It just becomes firmer and more precise.

It’s the sort of car that just can’t be unsettled, even with severe provocation, regardless of the road conditions. Foggy, wet, dry, patchy, even gravel strewn, it never seems to matter to the Gran Coupe.

It grips and goes, without ever feeling dull or boring. It’s just comfortably precise, all the time, without fail.

Even when it nears its limits, it just has a soft chirp from the inside tyres and tightens its way towards the inside of the corner and then hustles out again, with that tricky front diff finding grip where there really should not be grip.

For all that, its ability to drive sedately on heavily broken roads is just as impressive on its 19-inch boots. It soaks it all up well, covering ground without undue influence on its body control and with barely any road noise coming through from below decks.

There is some tyre roar on coarse-chip surfaces and the wind noise only begins above about 130km/h, so that’s OK, too.

The rear seat asks an odd question, though. It’s about the only significant oddity. There is far more legroom here (about 11cm) than in the old 2 Series, but there’s a big reinforcement beneath the seats that extends forward of the corners, the roofline is low to get into it and there’s not much headroom for adults of any size.

But kids of, say, 14 or so would find it perfectly fine.

If it’s a junior BMW 3 Series you’re after, well, you probably should. The 2 Series Gran Coupe is not a case of a car in the class to buy if you love BMW, but more of a car in the class to buy if you want the best car in the class.

It’s also a far more mature, rounded machine than the new 1 Series on which it is based, and it feels like a BMW, rather than a rebodied MINI.

The BMW M235i Gran Coupe is more a fully developed daily driver than the harder-riding A 35 or the CLA 35 from BMW’s arch-rival in Stuttgart and it’s fresher than Audi’s end-of-cycle A3 or S3.

So, if you can bear the sight of it (and it’s a lot less unattractive than the 1 Series), why not?

How much does the 2020 BMW M235i xDrive Gran Coupe cost?
Price: $69,990 (plus on-road costs)
Available: March
Engine: 2.0-litre inline turbo-petrol four-cylinder
Output: 225kW/450Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Fuel: 6.7L/100km
CO2: 153g/km
Safety rating: TBC