Buy This Straight-Six, RWD BMW M235i For New City Car Money

Have you actually realised how few front-engined, rear-wheel drive coupes there are left on sale today? If you hadn’t, then don’t go looking: the figures will probably only depress you. Everything from regulatory pressure to slipping sales means very few companies can justify building this sort of car anymore.

BMW is still holding out, but even its cheapest car of this ilk, the 220i, starts at a punchy £39,070, and you’ll have to settle for four cylinders and an automatic gearbox. Of course, things were rather different 10 years ago, when BMW would sell you the original 2 Series in six-cylinder manual form without you having to go all the way and buy an M2.

That car was the M235i, and like so many other cars of its era, it’s starting to look like a bit of a bargain. Take this one we’ve found on Auto Trader: it’s covered just 30,700 miles (big tick), has a manual (bigger tick), and with a £16,245 asking price, a bit of haggling could bring the price down to less than a boggo-spec Kia Picanto (biggest tick yet).

Now, the Picanto is a lovely car, but it definitely doesn’t have a tail-happy, rear-wheel drive setup or a lusty 322bhp turbocharged straight-six up front. It also won’t hit 62mph in five seconds flat, or top out at 155mph, like this M235i will.

It looks rather tidy, too, although a glance at its MOT history seems to suggest its one past owner had a habit of indulging in the sort of lavish tyre-smokery a small, powerful RWD car like this can produce. If that is a worry, though, the selling dealer says it has a fresh set of Bridgestone Potenza rubber on it. There’s a full BMW service history to boot, too.

Granted, black-over-black spec isn’t exactly the most exciting spec offered for the M235i, but at least it avoids the ill-advised and inexplicably popular combo of bright blue paint and red leather they were available with.

And we’ll say it once again: it’s a low-mileage, six-cylinder, manual BMW coupe for the same cost as some of the very cheapest new cars in Britain. To get that combo new, you’re going to need to spend well over twice as much on a new M2, which – and we hate to get bogged down with this sort of thing – is quite ugly. So please, somebody buy this, before we start looking at inadvisable bank loans.