BMW likes to do things its own way. Many times, I’ve slid behind the wheel of a Beemer and thought, Uh-oh, what’s going on here? When the iDrive infotainment controller debuted, in the 2001 7-Series, I sat by the side of the road for 20 minutes­ (at 2 a.m., after flying halfway around the world), trying to silence the radio. A few years later, it took me nearly that long just to figure out how to start a 6-Series and then engage Drive. 

Starting this car is a lot easier, once we locate the proper button—on the console, not the dashboard, and it doesn’t look like a button—but then the screen lights up with rows of gibberish. What the H is all that? Turns out the car is spelling out the time, in letters rather than digits or an clockface. Well, OK, this is kinda cool. But is this sort of thing innovation that moves motoring ahead, or is it mere showing off?

BMW knows its clientele, however. The M235 is a younger driver’s car. To a 25-year-old bro who’s spent half his life hunched over a gaming console, all this is normal, even desirable. (In fact, when the M235 is parked, the screen can serve as a gaming console, with a smartphone as the controller.) But to his grandad—me—it verges on annoying. Skip the histrionics, please, and show me the good stuff, the freude am fahren, as BMW has been putting it for 60 years now. 

Back in the middle ‘70s, when a BMW was the best car you could buy for $5,000 and M Sport variants did not yet exist, various family members had a 2000, a 2002, a Bavaria and an R75/5 motorbike, so we knew all about “sheer driving pleasure.” It's still there, or here. The M235’s slightly raucous 312-horsepower turbo Four—aided & abetted by a crisp 7-speed dual-clutch gearbox, all-wheel drive, serious brakes, sharp steering, high-back front bucket seats and an adjustable sport suspension—renders a carving knife designed to dice up a country road.

The 295 pound-feet of torque come on almost as quickly as in an electric car, and the transmission is always right there with the next gear, as eager as a Labrador waiting for a tennis ball. Swapping gears manually with the paddles is fun when we’re in the mood, but the computer does it equally well in either normal or sport mode. 

Bounding from corner to corner is the M235’s strong suit. It is less pleasing on the interstate, where it can be slightly nervous and eventually seems a bit noisy, while in town it takes potholes with all the grace of a wheelbarrow. This will not matter in the least to our 25-year-old bro, although it might unsettle his date—and the other couple, in the backseat, will be cramped. (They’re young, they can take it.)

An interesting side note is that the four-door 2-Series borrows its platform from the modern Mini (a subsidiary of Bayerische Motoren Werke) and thus comes with front-wheel drive standard. This is a bit of a shock to enthusiasts who worship at the altar of rear-wheel drive, but the Mini is a nimble handler in its own right, and anyway this car has BMW’s xDrive powering all four wheels, which tends to negate both under- and oversteer. To toss in one more simile, our AWD M235 clings to even diminishing-radius corners like a remora to a frisky shark. 

BMW also offers a non-Mini-based, rear-wheel-drive M2 coupe called, well, the M2. With a twin-turbo 6-cylinder engine, an even stiffer suspension and a choice of 6-speed manual or 8-speed automatic transmissions, it’s much more powerful and track-focused than the M235. It’s more costly, too—from a starting price of $66,675 it can climb to more than a hundred grand. The M2 can post heroic numbers on the racetrack, but this doesn’t make its sibling M235 any less of a true M Sport BMW.  

‘Opinionated at any speed’ will return in late September, after the Fortymile caribou herd migration ends in Alaska.