It’s not easy to settle the score on BMW, and few brands suffer more scrutiny. While no one can deny the competency of BMW’s greatest hits, the debate on modern BMW rages on: has the company lost its secret sauce, or merely become more sparing with its disbursement?
At the heart of the debate, as always, sits the new M3. Except, somewhere along the way, the brand swapped the iconic M3 nameplate to M4. The storied badge is now pasted only on the less popular—albeit better—four-door version of the two-door M4. It took years to wrap our collective heads around that change. But then one must accept there’s also a slightly less fast but still aggressive M440i and that, bizarrely, some of those have four doors. You can see why sorting out the state of modern BMW gets messy fast. The important bit, though, is that while I’m not the biggest fan of the M4, I’m quite happy with the M440i Gran Coupe.
It’s a car that almost begs you to misunderstand it. Modern naming conventions indicate that three-digit M cars sit below the M4 in the org chart. Therefore modern enthusiast convention dictates that three-digit M cars are phonies. And while the modern M cars are loaded with infinitely adjustable everything and ultra-sophisticated chassis tech, the M440i offers adaptive dampers, a limited-slip differential, and not much else. It isn’t the unflappable track machine that we’re led to believe M cars should be.
I happen to think that’s a load of rubbish. Despite the rewriting of history, few words are further from the tongue when you drive your workaday E46 3-Series or E39 5-Series than “sharp” or “focused.” The greatest hits cars aren’t ultra-stiff monsters built to joust with 911s, they’re compliant and friendly cars that still hold a conversation with your senses. Their chassis feel balanced and playful, but not aimed at shattering performance benchmarks. The real secret to BMW’s old equation was to build a competent, talkative, friendly car with an easygoing ride, powered by a bonkers Bavarian powerplant. Those ingredients made the whole thing just dumb enough to love.
That, it seems, is the formula BMW is chasing with the three-digit M cars. I already loved the M550i far more than the M5, and the same holds for the M440i. Being an adult with two functioning eyeballs, I’d opt for the subtler M340i, since it skips the buck-toothed monster grille and maintains a more conventionally handsome silhouette. Either way, you get a daily-driver enthusiast car that strikes a better balance than the big-dog above it in the lineup.
Sure, the M4 certainly drives better when you’re burying the throttle. The inline six’s crescendo sounds more compelling. The M4’s steering is quicker, its front-end grip almost shocking, and its acceleration more explosive. Yet that speed makes it absurdist on the road, a snot-nosed supercar with carbon buckets and a stick of dynamite crammed in its combustion chamber. You drive it around town the same way you take a guard dog for a walk.
Some people find that compelling. The sheer speed is tantalizing enough to ensure enough sales. That keeps the whole M enterprise alive. But as I’ve grown accustomed to easy, big speed, the thrill has faded. Sure I can take a backroad at a blistering pace, but even then I’ll be far from the limit of grip and closer to a weekend in county jail. There’s just less opportunity for spur-of-the-moment fun in a car so capable.
The M440i allows you to explore its limits a bit more, offering up 382 hp from its 3.0-liter twin-scroll-turbo straight-six. That’s plenty to motivate 4169 lbs, as proven in the E39 M5, which senior editor Kyle Kinard rightly pointed out is close to the modern M340i in power, weight, and size. Only now instead of relying on a divine naturally aspirated V-8 with a bellow to shake the trees, you get the power from a silky charmer that leaps up the tachometer with ease. There’s reward here for pushing further, for exploring the higher end of the rev range, but the pressure of the turbochargers cuts the fun off a little early. If it revved to eight grand, rather than cutting fuel at 7000 rpm, this B58 would already be a legend.
Chassis composure lives up to the old myth, too. The M440i is just as easy to shove into quick, predictable slides as its brethren from two decades ago. Everything about this car, from the way it transfers its weight to the way the all-wheel-drive system shuffles power, is predictable and intuitive. I’d skip the all-wheel-drive option myself, as the point here is to lower the car’s dynamic limits, so that you can access those limits more often. Still, it’s good to know that the Northermost among us can still have some fun in a vehicle that’ll work when the plows are delayed.
Yet that all-wheel-drive system likely does contribute to the synthetic feel of the steering. You’ll get morsels from it that tell you how much weight you’ve loaded onto the front axle. But if you’re looking for the kind of consistent information on tire adhesion limits and road surface imperfections that’ll taunt you into exploring the edge, you won’t find it here. There’s a rubbery feeling in this column that smooths everything over into one rubbery loop, the kind that’s fantastic for precision but disappointing for engagement. Ditto the superbly engineered and perfectly tuned eight-speed automatic. It’s so good that it detaches you from what violence or personality is contained in the potent engine. To get a manual you have to opt for the M4, a car so sophisticated that the manual transmission feels vestigial.
So this car, like the company that built it, exists trapped between worlds. It is a balanced, predictable, friendly driver’s car with an engine that elevates the entire experience. It is handsome, comfortable, respectable, and perfectly suited to all-year driving in total luxury and civility. It’s fun enough that you’ll enjoy it on the right road and great enough at everything else that you’ll never regret its $68,620 as-tested price. It has maintained, in many respects, all of the things that made its ancestors great. But those cars were built at a time when cars all wanted to talk to you, to reveal themselves to you through their steering wheels and vibrations. Now the average car just doesn’t do that. It isn’t that BMWs have gotten worse in terms of engagement. It’s that everything has. BMW is just the company we expected to hold the line.
