One of the main pains of M2 ownership is the impossible task of keeping the wheels clean. The junior M car suffers from excessive brake dust; a condition found in other M cars in the BMW lineup as well. Why bother washing the wheels at all when after a brief drive the face is plastered in brown soot once more. But you can’t ignore it either. Left unwashed long enough, and the brake pad material will embed deep into the painted surface somewhat permanently.
Ceramic coating – which I have had done to the entire car – prevents that, but it doesn’t solve the issue of how horrible it looks. What can solve it is switching out the factory brake pads to something like the Carbotech 1521. The BMW forums rave about the stark decrease in brake dusting after swapping to a set of those. For my money, anything has got to be better than the stock pads.
Also for my money, I can’t afford to switch out perfectly fine brake pads for the privilege of decreasing brake dust. At 21,000-some-odd miles, there’s still plenty of meat remaining on the factory units, and I’m far from judicious in brake pedal application. Perhaps if I were 10 years younger, I would not hesitate to dump working factory parts for better-performing aftermarket counterparts. Back in 2014, I tossed the lead acid battery of a brand new WRX STI for a sealed AGM battery. Because it’s better.
As we mature, we (hopefully) look at money differently. I’m going to milk the factory wearable parts for their entire designed life before replacement. I’ve certainly paid for it in the initial purchase price, right?
If the stock wheels’ finish gets destroyed by brake dust in the process, so be it. I can always replace it with a set of affordable Apex wheels. It’s the track wheel of choice for many a BMW, Porsche, and Corvette owners. I nearly bought a set earlier this year – when I also had a decision to make on tire replacement – but decided against spending a third of my monthly salary on secondary wheels..
I’ve definitely aged out of the paycheck-to-paycheck living in order to afford car modifications life. Those were fond days, it must be said.
Whenever I encounter other BMW M cars – cars, not the SUVs – on the road, I do the customary wave of acknowledgement. However, I hesitate to do the same for drivers of the newer G87 generation M2 (my 2021 M2 Competition is the F87). That car is so completely offensive to the eyes that I cannot give kudos to the owners. Either they don’t care how awful the G87 M2 looks, or their sense of beauty judgement is hugely skewed. What they don’t have to do is actually look at the car when they are behind the steering wheel.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are visually assaulted with that ungodly geometric mess. The G87 M2 makes the G80 M3’s buck-tooth grille look decent in comparison. Honestly, you’ve already lost when you have to caveat a car’s design with: “Trust me (bro), it looks better in person.”
I’ll keep the consensus timeless design of my F87 M2, thank you very much.
Shame, because from all accounts, the new M2 is a fantastic driving machine. (Some would say, the ultimate.) BMW’s design department may be in shambles (as the kids say), but at least the engineers at M are still tops of their game. Even if I could get over how it looks – and I really can’t – there’s many things incorrect with the new M2 that I’m not at all incentivized to upgrade.
First is the subtle cost-cutting. Gone is the beautiful carbon-fiber strut-brace in the F87. Gone are the four-piston fixed brake calipers at the rear. (BMW went with a single-piston sliding caliper on all GXX generation M cars in order to combine it with an electronic parking brake. A pure cost-saving measure. The company would argue there’s no deficit in performance, but if that’s really true, the likes of Porsche wouldn’t continue to use multi-piston fixed rear calipers on the 911, splitting out the parking brake as a separate unit.) Gone are forged wheels from the factory.
Gone is the dual-clutch automatic transmission. The ZF eight-speed in the G87 M2 is as great a torque-converter automatic as it gets. But it can never match a dual-clutch. The ZF loses on the downshift: not as crisp, not as quick. Again, you don’t see Porsche or Ferrari ditching the dual-clutch in their sports cars. BMW cut cost by using the same transmission that’s in every other internal combustion car in their lineup.
Second is the interior. I cannot stand the screen-only, giant iPad(s) trend that’s spreading throughout the automotive industry. Give me buttons, give me knobs. The only thing a screen in a car should do is to show Apple CarPlay from my iPhone. Needing to touch a display and go through menus just to adjust in-cabin temperature is diabolical design. There may be fans of BMW’s iDrive 8, but I am definitely not one of them.
It's worst enough that the G87 M2’s wide slab of screens took away physical dials and needles in the instrument cluster. BMW then saw fit to design digital replacements that aren’t round! An ergonomic disaster-class. Round clockfaces with defined detents allow the driver to easily glance at them, using peripheral vision, to ascertain the respective value. A trapezoidal bar thing that changes direction mid-bar is pure style, totally ignorant of function.
My F87 M2 is in the goldilocks zone for automotive interior: buttons and dials for everything, physical gauges, and a moderately-sized touchscreen LCD for CarPlay. That is all I will ever need.
And it might be all the car I’ll ever need. As much tempting metal there are out there - new or used, I can’t seem to bear parting with this BMW. It’s the perfect blend of sports, practicality, specialness, and modernity. It’s also arguably the last great looking BMW, right before this current era of bad shapes and malformed kidney grilles. Every time I think of selling, I change my mind immediately soon as I look at the M2’s beautifully muscular exterior.
Therefore, anything else I purchase would have to be in addition to the M2, because I know I will regret it if I were to sell. The car’s stubbornly high (in a good way) resale value makes it a difficult decision sometimes. It’s would be too easy to sell for a considerable sum and then go buy something else. But you know that money maturity thing I wrote about earlier? I’m not sure I want to spend the money on a second car simply for the love of this car enthusiast hobby.
Increase my income? There’s tradeoffs (read: time) to that too.
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Date acquired: October 2020
Total mileage: 21,821
Mileage this month: 440
Costs this month: $52.05
MPG this month: 18.9