2025 BMW M2 vs Alpine A110 R

How does the newly updated 480hp M2 get on when driven back-to-back with Alpine's R-rated masterpiece?

Spot the missing car. In any other year, we would’ve rolled out a Cayman 4.0 GTS to welcome an updated BMW M2 to the UK. But with the 718 hurtling toward retirement, Porsche doesn’t keep one on its current press fleet. And before very long, you won’t be able to buy one either. Sad times. We might’ve brought along our long-term Audi RS3 to fill the gap (given its price and power) though you need only drive the new M2 for half a minute to appreciate the many reasons why this would not have been worthwhile. Brass tacks: in terms of aura, only a 400hp Cayman seriously rivals a rear-drive BMW M chassis that's short of length and long on character.

So we brought an Alpine A110 R along instead. Less for meaningful competition and more to remind us of all the things the M2 doesn’t do quite so well. If this doesn’t seem very fair, then consider the extent to which BMW has the fast coupe market to itself. The TT has gone, and the 718 is going. Mercedes builds nothing directly comparable. Jaguar is presently committed to building nothing at all. As we’ve established, no hatchback can truly be said to hold a candle to it. The sublime A110 is here as a reality check (its own shortcomings notwithstanding) but it cannot undo the basic fact that if you want a brand-new, four-seat, right-drive coupe with a large, non-hybridised engine, then it's the Skyscraper Grey car you're looking at.

Of course, looking at any current BMW is usually where the arguments start. No, the facelifted M2 is still not pretty in a classical sense, nor a progressive one either. The A110, even with the R-specific aero disrupting its profile, is an air-cleaving arrowhead to the hole-punched 2 Series. Nevertheless, it is an unfortunate look rather than a good reason for not buying - famously the problem with its CLAR platform-sharing siblings. Thanks to its bulging arches and numerous exhaust pipes, it has the kind of physical presence that makes its enormous wheels (19-inch front, 20-inch rear) and tyres seem appropriate. Ditto the optional carbon roof. So much so that the concept of the M2 being a compact model does, once again, seem mostly theoretical. Only in length does an M4 appear to be meaningfully larger.

This impression transfers wholesale to the interior, which seems barely distinguishable from big brother - assuming you don't bother to turn your head and study the comparative lack of legroom afforded to back-seat passengers. Familiarity with BMW’s dash-spanning Curved Display is certainly not the same thing as affection; it’s about as invigorating to look at as the giant train timetable at London Waterloo - but it does its job, even if it means you now alter the temperature begrudgingly via the screen. There is a new design to account for the missing switchgear, although it’s the new flat-bottomed steering wheel that caused the most unflattering comparison with the spartan A110. Imagine grasping the low-hanging branch of a fully mature birch tree. That’s the sort of grimly predictable girth we’re talking about in the M2.

Still, it’s hard to gripe about the interior too much. Increased interaction with a touchscreen is on no one’s wish list in 2025, though if we had to choose an automotive OS to interact with, it would likely be the bells and whistles of the newly instituted BMW Operating System 8.5. In much the same way we’d more often than not choose a BMW cabin to sit in, for the simple reason that everything important tends to be acutely well-positioned for the business of driving. Not, perhaps, in the slip-me-on-like-a-glove style of the Alpine, which has the harnesses and hard surfaces that befit its fighter cockpit functionality - but like a burly, upmarket sports coupe nevertheless. Especially if you’re sitting on BMW’s weight-saving (and attention-grabbing) bucket seats, which are now available as an individual option, rather than being bundled in with the M Track Pack.

With Porsche’s naturally aspirated flat-six absent, there are precious few engines still on sale that we’d rather sit behind either. The meat of the alterations made to the M2 (such as they are) have been enacted here, a light round of software-based revisions resulting in slightly more power from BMW’s turbocharged 3.0-litre straight-six. Get to 6,250rpm now and you’ll have located 480hp, 20hp more than before and apparently sufficient to shave 0.1 second from the car’s 0-62mph time. If that sounds like a very modest improvement, that's because it is - yet who now would quibble with any output gain from a petrol engine? The incoming CS version will doubtless go further in shortening the gap to the M4 Competition, but it is already rare to ponder the need for additional straight-line speed.

It helps that BMW’s other core tweak has been made to the accelerator mapping with the intention of enhancing the M2’s responsiveness across all its various drive modes. Improved access to the S58’s 442lb ft of torque, even in its efficiency-focused default setting, is one of the things that separates the car from the RS3 - and most other rivals, for that matter. They tend to thrive on revs, as the A110 R does; the M2, deep-throated and ever alive to the impulsiveness of its driver, needs virtually no provocation at all to unleash the unflaggingly linear delivery that has become the engine’s calling card. Doubly so if you’ve chosen not to option the six-speed manual, which must make do with 37lb ft less peak twist and inevitably slower gear changes.

Sequentially flicking through shorter ratios via the Steptronic’s substantial, leather-clad gear lever (or very decent paddles) remains one of the current M car pleasures, its moreish quality heightened here by an unadulterated connection to the rear axle and its active diff. This sense of being ferociously pushed everywhere you go, like a supermarket trolley being hustled down the cereal aisle by John Regis, is nothing new - yet it captures much that is memorable about the M2 experience, and about BMW’s decision to end its pure combustion output with increasingly powerful iterations of a shorter wheelbase coupe. You hardly need to do much of anything to tap into a steroidal supply of exploitable, feel-good energy.

Or so it seems. Right up to the moment you buckle yourself into the A110 R and are made to realise just how hard you’ve been working - and, more obviously, how hard the adaptive chassis has been working under 1,725kg of what suddenly seems like deadwood. The M2, thanks to positive steering and attentive damping, hardly appears short of tenacity or traction or thickset agility in isolation, and yet, once again, it is made to feel about as wieldy as a two-headed sledgehammer by Alpine’s substantially lighter switchblade. For anyone who values changing direction like a Laser-class sailing dinghy, apparently unbound from anything as tedious as friction or mass or extraneous effort, the R is so far beyond the M2 that it’s like looking at Saturn from your back garden.

A regular A110, being mid-engined and unburdened by rear seats or a proper boot, would make the M2 seem unnecessarily portly, so it is hardly a surprise that the track day special, equipped with manually adjustable coilovers and asymmetric carbon wheels, takes it solidly to task. Nevertheless, the Alpine’s suppleness and talent for communication - and the way it assures you with absolute conviction that a corner you’ve previously slowed for requires no braking whatsoever - is a startling reminder of the difference between coupe and bespoke sports car. It’s like running an assault course at 48 after dinner, and then being offered to repeat it in your 18-year-old body, empty but for a working adrenal gland. On a B road, the R shows the M2 up almost everywhere.

Luckily for BMW, the real world is not made from deserted B roads; apply a finger almost anywhere else on the scale and it tips back in the M2’s favour - not least the fact that the R is now only available in run-out 70th Anniversary format, which costs from £103,345. Even when it launched, the R toiled under an £89,990 asking price, chiefly for its lack of engine X factor. In point of fact, the turbocharged 1.8-litre four-pot has always done its job admirably well, and requires not a single nag more than 300hp to record a 3.9-second-to-62mph time. But where you could pick the dulcet whirr of BMW’s hard-charging straight-six from a police lineup, the Renault lump thrums along in relative obscurity.

Factor in the usual advantages of building a coupe from conventional modular architecture and the M2’s superiority in technology, usability and fit and finish, and you start to come full circle: paying £68,705 - a starting price less than £7k north of the RS3 - seems a fair trade, even allowing for the options you’ll want to add on top. A Cayman GTS 4.0, for as long as there is one, is £75,300 before extras. Not unexpectedly, this leaves the new M2 much where we left the old one: endowed with plenty of sawn-off charm to justify its established hot rod reputation, if ultimately short of the kind of handling nuance that a lighter, leaner M car might have delivered. Expect the CS to take up some of that slack - although even if it doesn’t, BMW M has left us with something that no subsequent electrified model can automatically claim to be: a crowd-pleaser.

SPECIFICATION | 2025 BMW M2 (G87)

Engine: 2,993cc, twin-turbo, straight six
Transmission: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 480@6,250rpm
Torque (lb ft): 443@2,650-6,130rpm
0-62mph: 4.0secs
Top speed: 155mph (177mph with optional M Driver’s Pack)
Weight: 1,725kg (DIN)
MPG: 29.1
CO2: 221g/km
Price: £68,705 (Price as standard; price as tested £79,075, comprising M Race Track Pack (Carbon Fibre Interior Trim, M Carbon seats, M Carbon roof, M Drivers Pack (top speed increase, one-day BMW M race track training course) for £9,500, Skyscraper Grey metallic paint for £595, M brakes with red calipers for £275)

SPECIFICATION | 2024 ALPINE A110 R

Engine: 1,798cc, 4-cyl turbocharged
Transmission: 7-speed dual-clutch auto, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 300@6,300rpm
Torque (lb ft): 251@2,400-6,000rpm
0-62mph: 3.9 seconds
Top speed: 177mph
Weight: 1,082kg (minimum kerbweight)
MPG: 41.5 (WLTP)
CO2: 153g/km
Price: £96,990 (no longer available to order)

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GreatScott2016

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