BMW's bargain coupe car faces Audi's wild hyper hot hatch

The Story

BMW's M240i is one of the best value performance cars on the market. But is it worth the saving over an RS3?.

Is there such a thing as good value in today’s performance car market?. Such has been the rate at which prices have been rising over the last decade, you’d be forgiven for thinking not. Porsche’s 911 Carrera is now a £100,000-plus concern, and ‘junior’ mid-engined supercars start at over £200,000. Anything at the top of the hot hatch tree will set you back more than £60,000.

I have a candidate, though. Consider BMW’s newly mild-hybridised M240i xDrive, a brawny sports coupe with a 387bhp straight-six, good for 62mph from rest in 4.3sec, yours from £50,215. It’s comparable on performance to those aforementioned top-tier hyperhatches. The question, then, is what are you giving up; what is that £10,000-plus saving losing you, and do you really miss it?.

Look at the Audi RS3 and you might say a fair wedge of attitude. Next to it, the M240i is just a little bit invisible, in part a symptom of its second-string billing beneath the M2 and in part because the RS3’s Kyalami Green coachwork is little short of blinding. Ingolstadt’s five-cylinder hero wears all the great fast Audi calling cards like a suit of armour.

Blistered, vented arches, a gaping maw and voluminous oval exhausts are standard, while optional carbon bits, including a rear wing, elevate it still further. By comparison, the BMW just looks a touch awkward, its cool, almost E30-like silhouette betrayed by odd angles, weird shapes and strange line-work.

If it’s not much to look at from the outside, inside the M240i is a fine place to find yourself. Not much has changed for this recent update, but the curved display still looks modern and is reasonably intuitive, even if too many vital controls are held hostage behind pixels. The GT vibes of this car’s Oyster leather seats juxtapose with carbonfibre trim and the grotesquely overinflated steering wheel rim, here with a red strip at 12 o’clock.

Taking the CLAR platform used in BMW’s saloons, with its rear-drive bias and longitudinal engine layout, the M240i’s bones are those of a proper driver’s coupe, so you’re set nice and low and closer to the rear axle than the front.

Ahead, BMW’s ubiquitous silky six, the single-turbo B58, emits a full-bodied if not overly textured bellow as you press the starter button. It wasn’t exactly a peaky motor before, or ever particularly breathless, but a jolt of electrification courtesy of a 48-volt mild-hybrid system has widened its reach still further. The 18bhp increase in maximum power to 387bhp isn’t as noticeable as the fact that the peak now arrives 300rpm earlier, from 5200rpm, notably lower than the 5600rpm at which the RS3’s greater 394bhp arrives.

Maximum torque is up from 369lb ft to 398lb ft, making it 29lb ft torquier than the Audi. That slug of grunt arrives in full sooner too, from 1900rpm versus 2250rpm in the RS3. The sacrifice is an extra 65kg, bumping the M240i’s kerb weight up to a portly 1755kg, some 190kg more than the Audi. Yikes.

Audi’s technical makeup is curiously almost opposite to the BMW’s. Its bones are more conventional family hatch but with a high-performance steroid shot (or seven). So yes, while you open the Audi’s door to reveal a set of truly spectacular, more supportive, but optional (£2500) bucket seats, you still feel like you’re sitting higher. Aside from the seats, clues to the RS3’s flagship positioning inside are fewer and further between than you’d perhaps like for its £60,000-plus price.

The oddly shaped steering wheel (complete with infuriating haptic controls) does at least have two bright red buttons, one for putting the RS3 in its most aggressive dynamic mode and the other a shortcut key to your own preferred settings. Unlike in the BMW, the wheel rim doesn’t appear to be in anaphylactic shock. But otherwise it’s relatively standard A3, which is to say reasonably solidly put together with nice materials but lacking a bit of theatre.

Why It Matters

The RS3’s five-pot is a joyous thing to exercise; it also brings into focus just how smooth the powerband is in the new BMW.

CarMotion Daily’s Take

Anything at the top of the hot hatch tree will set you back more than £60,000. Watch this space over the coming weeks. Markets rarely reward single announcements — execution over the next two to four quarters is what closes the gap between press release and customer. How this lands depends less on the announcement itself and more on the rollout, dealer support, and after-sales story behind it. Specifics on pricing, availability, and regional rollout will tell us whether this moves from headline to delivery. Independent verification and follow-up coverage from rival outlets tend to firm up the picture within days.