BMW M2 CS Review

BMW built the M2 CS the way it used to build these. Strip what can be stripped, stiffen what cannot, and charge accordingly. The S58 goes to 523 horsepower against the standard car's 473, carbon fiber replaces the roof, the hood and the trunk lid, the front seats are carbon buckets, and roughly a hundred pounds come out of a coupe that still weighs a little under thirty eight hundred. On a spec sheet that is a rounding error. On a road it is not, because almost all of the saving sits high up, and the CS changes direction with a sharpness the ordinary M2 has never had. The steering is still short on feel and still the least convincing part of the car.

The engine is the reason to buy it. The S58 has been the best six cylinder on sale for several years and here it is boosted to the point where the eight speed automatic can no longer hide its own competence: shifts are instant, perfectly judged and completely unromantic. Which is the CS problem stated in one line. BMW deleted the manual, still available on the base M2, from the car aimed squarely at the people who would have paid extra for it. Buyers have said so loudly and BMW has not answered.

Everything else is the usual bill. The cabin is a current BMW cabin: a good driving position, excellent seats, and a curved display running iDrive that buries climate functions two taps deep for no reason anyone can defend. The S58 itself has held up reasonably well in service, but the electronics around it have not, and the running costs on carbon ceramic brakes and staggered Cup 2 tires are punishing if the car is used the way it was built to be used. Fuel economy is what a boosted six in a heavy coupe returns, which is sixteen in town on a good day.

What rescues the value case is the badge. CS cars hold money in a way ordinary M cars do not, and at just under a hundred thousand dollars this one arrives with a production run short enough to keep that true. It is the best small M car since the last M2 CS, and it is fifteen thousand dollars more than that one cost. Both halves of that sentence are worth saying out loud.