BMW M4 manual 2022 review

BMW doesn't offer a manual gearbox on the M3 and M4 in the UK. We try one in Germany to see if we're missing out The global car market is probably more homogenised than it ever has been. You can buy a BMW 3 Series in London, in LA or in Tokyo just like you can a Big Mac. Nevertheless, subtle differences remain, and those are often the most tantalising. You can order a beer in a Belgian McDonalds, and you can order a manual BMW M4 at a German BMW dealer.The reason why BMW won’t bring over the manual BMW M3 and M4 is easy to guess and a quick browse of the classifieds for previous-generation M3s and M4s confirms it: not very many people want to buy one.That logic makes sense, but when Toyota has announced it’s coming with a manual version of the Supra and Porsche is bringing out what is effectively a rear-wheel-drive manual version of the 911 Turbo, one might wonder if BMW should reconsider. After all, it does build right-hand-drive manual versions for Australia and Japan, so all the engineering work is done.BMW probably won’t change its mind, so the more pertinent question is whether we’re missing out on something. When I went to drive the tweaked BMW M135i recently, BMW wheeled out a manual M4 from its German press fleet for me to try.A brief refresher on the M3 and M4: in most regions, BMW offers them both in ‘plain’ and Competition versions. The non-Competition was always intended as the purist’s choice, with a manual gearbox and rear-wheel drive only. In the UK, we get only the Competition, which has 30bhp extra, comes with only the admittedly brilliant eight-speed automatic, gets some additional equipment and can be optioned with BMW’s fiendishly clever xDrive four-wheel drive system.