Latest Cars & Motorbikes: 2016 10Best Cars

WE GO TO THE PLANTS AND PROVING GROUNDS TO FIND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THE CARS WE LOVE FOR 2016.

10Best involves more than drawing up lists of our sub-$80,000 favorites. Every year we enter our weeklong evaluation looking for new and improved combinations of virtues: value and engagement, performance and poise, sights and sounds, soul and character. The cars that earn this award do more than merely succeed on one or two criteria; they come to us fully formed, polished, complete. But how do they get that way? This year we delve deeper into our winners’ makings to better explain why they won. Who builds and develops these cars? Where? How do they go about it? What is a 10Bester truly made of? There are, of course, varied answers because cars are not simple things. You do not buy them on Etsy, and we’re not running a Maker Faire here. Automobiles are still the most complex and technologically advanced consumer products that man has ever devised. What follows in this section is our proof.

2016 10Best Cars: BMW M235i

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2016 10Best Cars: BMW M235i

A PRODUCT OF ITS ENVIRONMENT.

NOV 2015 BY DAVEY G. JOHNSON MULTIPLE PHOTOGRAPHERS

2912 SHARES

10Best Cars

To sort out the “how” of the BMW M235i’s construction, one must start roughly 30 million years ago, when the African continental plate started its eons-long rumble with the Eurasian plate, squeezing the Alps up out of the earth. Fortuitously, a century ago, an aero-engine factory set up shop in Munich, at the foot of the Bavarian swath of these mountains, whereupon it started building motorcycles and later moved to automobiles.

The “how,” then, is inextricably linked to the “where.” Imagine if Henry Ford and William Crapo Durant had set up shop in Denver, logging early development miles on the serpentine, challenging Million Dollar Highway (U.S. Route 550). Perhaps Detroit’s boulevardiers, so perfect for eating up the long, flat miles of the American Midwest, might have turned out differently. Perhaps more like BMWs.

Assembly Plant: Leipzig, GermanyOther U.S.-Market Models Constructed at Leipzig: i3, i8

Famed for their driver-centered nature, BMW’s vehicles have lately become more things to more folks. It sold nearly 100,000 trucks in the U.S. this year, almost a third of the brand’s volume. But this M variant of the 2-series still does exactly what we expect of the company’s machines. The steering informs you of the road’s every nuance. Squeeze the brakes for a corner and the lower-right side of your foot drops easily onto the accelerator to match engine revs for a downshift. It’s the sort of stuff that always seemed so natural to the marque’s cars that one assumed the engineers didn’t even sweat it, that this sort of correctness was baked into Bavarian genes sometime in the Middle Ages and only revealed itself upon the advent of the automobile.

“Exhibits the kind of focus that one used to take for granted in a BMW.” –J. Lorio

We once heard this perhaps-apocryphal story: American BMW dealers in the Sun Belt sent a litany of complaints back to Germany about the uselessness of Euro-spec air-conditioning systems. The factory scoffed, but finally deigned to send over an engineer as a sop to an important market. The poor guy was thrown in the back seat of a black car, windows rolled up, and driven across a summer-scorched Texas until Munich got the message.

The flip side of that sometimes-maddening Teutonic belief in its engineering rectitude is that we still have cars like the M235i, even as the need to be all things to all people around the globe conspires to put these sorts of cars at risk.

The M235i takes everything BMW has traditionally done well and concentrates it into a compact, livable package. The 320-hp 3.0-liter turbo six doles out sweet, smooth power. The chassis isn’t punishing the way the M235i’s larger M-badged siblings can be. And with the M2 now on the way, the M235i should be forever freed from the need to post fantasy performance numbers.

While BMW has succumbed to selling indulgences, the M235i coupe stands as the right automobile for just about any road, whether your daily commute is a stoplight horror or the sort of Alpine pass that BMW engineers slalom home on after heli-skiing weekends. The guys responsible for this wonderful thing should probably just nail a picture of the car to the front door in Munich. It worked for Martin Luther.

How We’d Build It

We’d keep our M235i trim by opting for BMW’s no-cost synthetic SensaTec upholstery, adding the dealer-installed limited-slip differential ($3240), and saving 200 bucks over the Cold Weather package by opting for just the heated seats ($500). The rest of our choices are no-cost decisions: summer tires to best exploit the car’s handling prowess and, naturally, a manual transmission. Total damage: $48,885.