If you need to get away in a ship that steers like a star, this is your car
However, this trio more or less gets it. Handed the key to the Audi A4 or the BMW 2-series or the new Jaguar XE—any of their versions, by the way—you can happily chase horizons for as long as the money supports your vagrant gypsy lifestyle. Yes, in order to produce a 10Best winner from this class, we had to cut the holes in our filter extremely fine. Which is a true statement about many segments these days. Cars are indeed demanding more and more gold, but they’re also getting better and better. As evidence, we give you Audi and Jaguar, both challengers to BMW’s longstanding domination of the compact-sports-sedan genre, but both at vastly different stages of their journeys.
This year, 10Best again proved that there are some nice cars to choose from if you’ve budgeted $40,000 to $50,000, but few are as entertaining as BMW’s top 2-series models, with their combination of humble size; pouncing, liquid thrust from the optional six pots; and piano-wire tension to the controls. You can see why we picked the M235i last year, but the world keeps turning. The 2-series lineup gets new monikers: The 230i replaces the 228i as the base four-cylinder; the M235i becomes the M240i; and now there’s the juiced M2, basically an M240i with flares, chairs, tires, brakes, and a suspension tune, plus another 30 horsepower (though it can only match the M240i’s torque with a time-limited overboost function).
Meanwhile, fresh new sheetmetal from elsewhere is chasing the sports-sedan dollar. Another writer, Mark Twain, said cauliflower is just cabbage with a college education. For many years, an Audi could be dismissed as just a Volkswagen with a Ph.D. But more than two decades after VW lit Audi’s fire with a deluge of investment in technology and design, a formidable new A4 2.0T sat on our Week Two ballots, attached to a brand with real momentum.
Jaguar is the newcomer, having been set free by Ford in 2008 to float downstream like Moses in the basket and into the caring embrace of India’s Tata conglomerate. Under Ford, Jaguar was never able to effectively break into the under-$50,000 market where all the action was happening. For Brits, waking up after the Brexit vote must have taken them back to the day they woke up to find an X-type parked in the driveway. Lots of precious time was lost while Jaguar continued to gasp on the sales of its expensive ingots of tweedy British snobbery, steadfastly refusing to take seriously the youth movement in the luxury market that was passing it by.
Jaguar strives to give buyers choice in its first real compact sports sedan, the XE. There are three engines, including a diesel; the option of rear- or all-wheel drive; and a variety of trim levels and options that start in the heart of the market at $35,895 and range up to the snorty R-Sport, the prices easily jumping back over the $50,000 mark where Jag has always seemed more comfortable.
The 2.0-liter diesel and the 3.0-liter supercharged V-6 XEs showed up at 10Best while the turbocharged four-cylinder gas engine did not. We also had the new XF, the middle sedan between the XE and the slinky and sadly too-rare XJ, and were struck by how similar the styling is. Instead of presenting something new in the XE, Jaguar’s designers seem to have just shaved off a few inches from the XF. Jag needs a cymbal crash to announce its rebirth to younger buyers unaccustomed to seeing the leaper offered at affordable lease rates. Yet the XE is two pillows banging together.
We found no real fresh thinking in the XE’s interior, either, about which several voters complained of cramped packaging. The orderly layout of the buttons, gauges, and de rigueur infotainment screen—much improved from previous generations but prone to freezing up in our cars and still lacking a console master-control knob—is convenient enough. But the near universality of black molded plastic and black leather makes for an interior that looks like one big lava flow that froze in 2006.
Compare the XE’s dark, dull, pro-forma cabin with either the BMW 2’s classically technical cockpit or the Audi A4’s, an altogether more exciting—and more spacious—place to do business. The future is being imagined in the Audi as a harmony between the digital and the analog, the instruments a large, configurable TFT screen able to show car information, various menus, or a giant map. Yet it still feels as if you’re piloting a car, not an iPad. It’s brighter and livelier than the Jag even if you choose black, having as it does swaths of silvery trim that make it less like working at a coal face. With a luxury sports sedan, it’s not just about the dynamics.
Even so, the Audi, with the 2.0-liter turbo four, the only engine available this year, moves with a silky grace and balletic control of its motions, the miles dispensed with cool proficiency if not much drama. The mostly aluminum Jag, and especially the 340-hp “35t,” works harder to make a show, exhibiting faster steering once turned off its significant center dead spot, a pronounced if not entirely exquisite roar from the engine (hey, it’s a V-6), and a hearty appetite for hard corners.
Of the Audi, editors said they wished it had more driving character. It seals you up and sends you on your way, but it doesn’t thrill. Of the Jag, they wished it had more refinement and fresh thinking. Road noise and rattles were cited, as were frustrations with the fritzy InControl entertainment apps. Meanwhile, the M240i stood out, like the M235i last year, as an enormously athletic and capable little torpedo that romps around our test loop making joyous (and electronically augmented) sound and, in traffic, turns you into a stereotypical BMW schmuck in about 15 minutes. BMW drivers aren’t born, they’re made by cars like this, cars that encourage you to thrust and slash gleefully through the herds of plodding sheep.
The M240i has a sporting suspension, but it won’t liberate any loose dentistry. The rigid M2 will, this extremist shaking our fillings over the rougher sections as the steering sniffed feverishly for apexes. The M2 prefers corners to straights the same way a German shepherd prefers pork chops to applesauce, but that’s part of its hyperactive charm. Cars like the M2 form the radioactive core of BMW’s performance credibility, and the M240i backs off just enough to please drivers who find it a little too hot at the center.
Thus, in our little Goldilocks scenario, in which all the chairs were tried, the adoration inevitably fell back on the BMW. Not the 3-series, which has grown too large and too mainstream to any longer earn our passion, but the smaller 2-series, which is just under a foot shorter than an A4 and reminds us of E30s and E46s and the Way Things Used to Be. BMW is at heart a small-vehicle company, a course set in 1959 when Herbert Quandt saved the ailing maker of princely handmade bolides and diverted its resources into the 1961 1500, instantly creating the market for compact sports sedans.
And oh, how BMW squanders an opportunity by giving us only a two-door 2-series. Just imagine a sedan and a wagon to choose from on this platform, with the same delightful cockpit and controls. Yes, small, but many things are shrinking these days (even SUVs), and BMW should follow, giving us at least one full product line in the catalog that plucks the same heartstring as that original 1500.
Well, that’s idle dreaming. At sunrise on the day after 10Best, here’s where the votes piled up: on the M240i, a small car hugging tight a 335-hp turbo inline-six, and the M2, the same vehicle but with all slack drawn out of the suspension and steering. The cars may be small, but the prices are mighty; the M240i starts at $45,445, and the only color that isn’t a $700 option is white. The M2 begins at $52,695, again, white-only if you don’t want to pay extra. If you wish to celebrate BMW’s small-car heritage and expertise, BMW makes you pay dearly—indeed, bleeds you white.
But people will pay it. There are no comparable options because the industry has largely abandoned to front-drive platforms buyers of compact sports sedans who wish to drive a compact. To accept a 2-series into your life, you have to want small—not Mini-Cooper–snug but what was considered mid-size only a couple generations ago—and be willing to live with two doors and the fumble-bum way they make you squeeze into the teensy back seat. Plus that price. It’s a lot to ask, we know, but if you need to get away in a ship that steers like a star, this is your car.