First Drive Review
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Is it still heresy if the car’s excellent?
One of the worst things a carmaker can do is succeed. You can mint money selling cars to which people are indifferent, but if you get every last detail right and build something spectacular, you’re screwed. When buyers love your car, they don’t want it to ever change. But government regulations, fickle mainstream tastes, and the fact that nobody but Morgan has yet figured out how to keep an entire company afloat building the same product for decades mean that, eventually, you’ll need to redesign. And change means backlash.
BMW M fans got a double shot of hard-to-swallow change when the brand announced the next generation of its internal muse, the M3. It makes its power not as it winds to a banshee-wail, naturally aspirated redline, but rather via a pair of turbochargers. And the coupe, the original and most iconic M3 body style, was rechristened M4 to align with BMW’s naming convention du jour. (The sedan keeps the M3 moniker.)
They Call Me F82
Based on the current, F30-generation 3- and F32 4-series, the new M4 is longer and wider than its predecessor, but should weigh about the same. It also gets its own chassis code for the first time: F82. Extremists applaud BMW’s fanatical approach to weight savings, and on this generation, BMW fashions the front and rear suspension links from aluminum, as well as the hood and the fenders. Carbon fiber is used for the roof, the driveshaft, and the trunklid.
While the M3 and M4 are identical in many ways and share many part numbers, that trunk is one of the bigger differences. Engineers tell us that they wanted the two cars to have the same aerodynamic properties, but the airflow over the coupe’s shorter roof would have required a large spoiler, which designers didn’t want. Instead, they formed a new trunklid with an integrated ducktail spoiler. The thinking was, “if you’re going to do it, do it right.” So while they were designing the new lid, they designed it with a carbon-fiber inner structure and fiberglass outer skin.
Bushwhacking
Rubber bushings between the regular 4-series rear subframe and the unibody allow the assembly to squirm under duress, diluting handling precision. Here, there are no rubber bushings. The subframe is bolted directly to the unibody for a more rigid structure. This, plus additional bracing and stiffer suspension, results in a car that is vastly more responsive and immediate than the regular 4-series. The M4 thus is also more eager to let its tail step out. Once that happens, though, it’s easy to hang it out there and control your slip angle or snap it back into line. It’s a total gas, supremely responsive and controllable.
The downside to such a delightful chassis is that, even in the softest of its three adjustable damper settings, the M4 is stiff-legged. The roughest stretches of pavement feel like a Baja blast, but, luckily for Americans outside of Michigan, such roads are rare. And it’s a typical tradeoff for such flat, predictable handling. The brakes are quite strong, but the pedal isn’t quite as responsive at the top of its travel as we’d like.
Electric power steering also saves weight in the M4, and its fantastic weighting can be tailored from Popeye (Sport+) to Olive Oyl (Comfort), with Sport being a comfortable yet meaty middle ground for the majority. While the weighting changes, the numbness never does, but the steering is so immediate and so precise that it feels unfair to complain about a lack of feel. There are few better steering racks overall on the market.
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