Middle age bloat, it seems, can come for the best of us. Subaru's Forester started as a scrappy little tall wagon and now it's the size of an early Ford Explorer, the Ford Thunderbird began life as a close-coupled two seater on a wheelbase very deliberately the same length as the Corvette's and in twenty years was a bloated 5,000lb hardtop on the platform of the Lincoln Continental Mk.IV, and the Honda Accord's wheelbase has grown almost twenty inches since the mid 1970s.
Similarly, the BMW 3-series has gone from a compact little sports sedan to a plush near-midsize car, and this means the sporting cars spun off from it, the M3 and M4 have ballooned in size, weight, and price.
The 2-series coupe and convertible that showed up in 2014 was something of an antidote to that. Size-wise, it harked back to the now-classic E36 3-series coupes.
Like those coupes, there was an M-version and 2013 saw the second generation of the M2. The original North American market E36 M3 coupe of 1994 was powered by the S50B30US, a 240hp 3.0L DOHC straight six. The 2023 version of the M2 is also powered by a 3.0L DOHC straight six, but this one, the S55, has a pair of intercooled turbos bolted to it and belts out 453 ponies.
The result is eye-watering acceleration: in Car and Driver's testing of the 6-speed manual version, 3.9 seconds was all it took to sprint from a standstill to sixty and the quarter mile flashed past in 12.2 seconds at 118mph through the traps. The eight-speed automatic was even quicker. (The E36 M3 performed those same feats in 5.6 and 14.3 seconds, with a 98mph trap speed, for comparison's sake.)
Alas, the 2023 second generation of the M2 is following the seemingly inevitable trajectory of all things automotive, having gained an inch of wheelbase and a hundred pounds of avoirdupois over the outgoing generation.
This Alpine White one was photographed in August of 2024 using a Pentax K20D and a DA 18-135mm F3.5-5.6ED zoom lens.
