My neighbor two doors down owns a detailing business, and every so often, he ends up with a customer’s car sitting in his driveway for a few extra days waiting on a ceramic coating slot. Last month, it was a 2026 M4 Competition in that Isle of Man Green everyone’s been posting on Instagram, and he offered to let me run errands in it “so it doesn’t just sit there.”
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
What I expected was a stiff, loud, slightly obnoxious coupe that’s fun for twenty minutes and exhausting after that. What I got was something I actually started looking forward to driving to the grocery store in, which surprised me more than I want to admit.
First Impressions Aren’t What You’d Guess
The styling debate around this generation of M4 has been going on for years at this point, and I’m not going to pretend I have some fresh take on the grille. You either look past it, or you don’t. What nobody really talks about is how the car feels the moment you sit in it.
The driving position is lower and more snug than I expected coming from a regular 4 Series. The seats — mine had the optional carbon bucket seats — grab you in a way that makes you sit up and pay attention before you’ve even started the engine. First time I got in, I actually laughed a little because it felt like strapping into something more serious than a daily-driver coupe.
Starting it up in a quiet residential street at 7am is not a subtle experience. The exhaust cracks and settles into a burble that’s loud enough that I found myself apologizing to nobody in particular before backing out of the driveway.
The Engine Is the Whole Story Here
This car runs the twin-turbo inline-six, and in Competition trim, you’re looking at output in the 500-horsepower range. What struck me wasn’t the peak number, though — it was how it builds power.
There’s a flat stretch of on-ramp near my place that I use to judge merging power in every car I test. In the M4, I merged onto a highway doing maybe 35 mph and had to actively back off before I was doing something I’d regret in front of a state trooper. The pull from around 3,000 rpm onward doesn’t really let up until you’re well past speeds you’d want to admit to.
Here’s the thing that actually impressed me more than the straight-line speed: throttle response in the everyday Comfort setting is completely usable. You don’t need to be in some aggressive Sport Plus mode just to pull out of a parking lot without feeling like the car is fighting you. A lot of performance cars make you choose between “boring” and “unhinged,” and this one has a real middle ground.
Living With It for Actual Errands
I used this thing for groceries, a hardware store run, and picking up a friend from the airport, so I got a decent read on the practical side.
- Trunk space is fine for normal life, not for a Costco run. I fit two grocery bags and a case of water comfortably. Anything bigger and you’re playing Tetris.
- The back seat exists, technically. I put my six-foot-tall friend back there for the airport ride, and he was polite about it, but he also asked to switch with the front passenger after fifteen minutes.
- Ride quality in Comfort mode is genuinely livable. I braced for a bone-rattling ride and instead got something that handled potholes on my street better than my own car does.
- Fuel economy dropped fast once I started actually using the throttle. If you drive it gently, it’s reasonable for a performance coupe. If you don’t, budget accordingly.
Step-by-Step: How to Actually Evaluate One on a Test Drive
Dealerships love to send you around a five-minute loop with a stop sign and a speed bump. That tells you nothing. Here’s the sequence I’d use if I were actually shopping for one:
- Start the car cold and just sit there for a minute. Listen to how it idles, check that the exhaust note isn’t something that’ll annoy you or your neighbors every single morning.
- Drive it in Comfort mode through normal traffic first. This is how you’ll experience the car 80% of the time, so don’t skip straight to Sport Plus and judge the whole car off that.
- Find an on-ramp or open stretch and get on the throttle from a rolling start. This is where the turbo six actually shows what it can do, and it’s a better real-world test than a dead stop launch.
- Test the brakes at highway speed, more than once in a row. M4 Competition brakes are strong, but I’d want to feel for any fade if the test car has done a few hard stops already that day.
- Try parking it in a tight spot. The visibility out the back is worse than you’d think, thanks to the thick pillars, and a rearview camera you actually trust matters here.
- If you can, drive it back to back against a 3 Series or an M240i on the same day. The differences in feel are easier to notice in direct comparison than from memory a week later.
A Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t
I left the car in the more aggressive steering and suspension settings for a boring highway drive because I forgot to switch it back after a fun back-road detour the day before. Forty minutes of stiff ride and heavy steering on a straight highway is not a good time, and it’s a completely avoidable annoyance. The car has an M mode button that lets you save your preferred aggressive setup for a quick toggle — use it, don’t just leave everything cranked up by accident as I did.
I’d also underestimated how much the automatic engine stop-start feature would bug me in stop-and-go traffic. It’s smooth mechanically, but there’s a slight delay on restart that felt out of character for a car this quick. You can turn it off each drive, but it resets every time you restart the car, which got old by day three.
Common Mistakes People Make When Buying This Car
Talking to a couple of actual owners at a local cars-and-coffee meetup, a few recurring regrets came up:
- Skipping the extended warranty conversation. BMW’s turbo six is strong, but repair costs on these cars outside of warranty are not cheap, and a couple of owners specifically wished they’d negotiated coverage terms harder at signing.
- Not test driving the manual and automatic back to back if both are available. People assume they know which they’ll prefer and sometimes talk themselves out of the one that actually suits their driving.
- Underestimating tire costs. These run performance rubber that doesn’t last forever if you enjoy the car the way it’s clearly built to be enjoyed.
- Buying without checking insurance quotes first. A couple of people got a surprise here since the Competition trim carries a noticeably different premium than the base M4.
Final Thoughts
Handing the keys back to my neighbor felt worse than it should for a car I had only had for a week. It’s quick in a way that’s genuinely hard to get bored with, but the part that actually sold me was how normal it felt to just drive around town without constantly fighting the car or apologizing for it. That balance is harder to pull off than people give BMW credit for, and after spending real days with it instead of a rushed test drive loop, it’s easy to see why this generation keeps showing up on so many “car of the year” shortlists despite all the grille jokes.
If you’re shopping for one, don’t judge it off a ten-minute dealership loop. Get a full day if you can, drive it the way you’d actually live with it, and you’ll probably come away as surprised as I was.