Driving report BMW M135i xDrive: Eurofighter

People are self-confident south of the Danube. Mia san mia is not only the motto of the most successful football club in Germany, but also the motto of life. This is also the case with BMW. If the sales figures then skyrocket, the breasts of the white-blue turbine disciples swell even more. This is exactly the case with the cars that bear the letter M twice in their name: last year, 163,541 dynamic fans snapped up a product from the sports department of the Munich car manufacturer.

The M Performance models in particular are fueling this sales boom with 116,987 units. No matter how much the cast-iron M-freaks turn up their noses and mock these cars as “Mchen” – the normative power of the factual is clear. One of the bestsellers is the BMW M135i xDrive, which for the last two years has beaten arch-rival Mercedes AMG A 35 4Matic at the sales counter. Most of the fans of the Bavarian compact sports car come from Europe: around 80 percent of the cars stayed on the home continent. Above all, motorists in Great Britain, Germany and Switzerland put a powerful BMW 1 Series in their garage.

Interestingly, 60 percent opt ​​for the conventional steel chassis and not the version with the adaptive dampers. So that this Eurofighter does not fight with blunt weapons in a duel with the competitors from Stuttgart and Ingolstadt, the BMW technicians sharpen the Power 1er. That strikes a chord with customers, who, at an average of 43 years, are significantly younger than other BMW buyers. “We evaluated the control units and found that the drivers of the BMW M135i xDrive are just as dynamic as those of the BMW M3,” explains project manager Carsten Binder.

The engine remains basically unchanged with 225 kW / 306 hp and a maximum torque of 450 Newton meters. That leaves the popular steel chassis to breathe more life into the popular everyday rider. The lateral dynamics specialists from Munich paid particular attention to the two axles of the steel chassis. The engineers revised the wishbone and trailing arm bearings (now 15 percent stiffer) and increased the front wheel camber by two degrees. With an axle load distribution of 59 (front) to 41 (rear), this trick improves the steering behavior significantly. The asphalt dance confirms the successful implementation. The BMW M135i literally sucks itself into the radius of a curve. The fact that the four-cylinder engine weighs significantly less than a unit with six pots is not necessarily a disadvantage either.

But the transverse dynamics fun is far from over. Finally, you have to aim for an apex and then accelerate out cleanly. The nimble Munich driver also completed these two parts of a dynamic cornering with flying colors without showing the radical uncompromising nature of a BMW M2. That is also the intention. If necessary, the all-wheel drive favors the rear axle a little more than was previously the case. A maximum of 50 percent of the drive power goes to the rear, after all, the front axle plays the main role in the BMW 1 Series. The M135i conceals this fact quite successfully. The 1,525-kilogram compact sports car remains neutral for a long time with a rear that encourages the driver to carve in a friendly manner.

The precise steering helps with circling, doesn’t annoy you with too much restoring force, but could be a little more informative. It is just as important that this greed for corners is not paid for with rock-hard springs and dampers as is agility. After all, the BMW M135i xDrive not only takes to the race track, but also gets down to business on the motorway. It should be clear to everyone that the robust Bavarian is not a sedan chair. But the newly tuned steel chassis copes with short successive transverse joints just as smoothly as long waves. The good 19 inch tires make this task even more challenging. The fact that the four-cylinder engine fires off muffled volleys in sport driving mode as soon as you let off the gas or downshift is not for everyone. The individual configuration menu can help: simply select the Comfort item under Motor and the acoustic Oops, Now I’m Coming mode is deactivated. The engine still sounds pleasantly rich, remains snappy and pushes the BMW M135i xDrive in 4.8 seconds from a standstill to country road speed and further up to 250 km/h. According to BMW, an average of 7.8 l/100 kilometers (WLTP) flows through the combustion chambers. It’s no surprise that this value is surpassed when driving for fun. With a base price of 53,650 euros, the BMW 135 xDrive is more expensive than the Mercedes-AMG A35 4Matic and Audi S3 Sportback.