2021 BMW 228i xDrive Gran Coupe Full Review | Even Cheap BMW's Have Launch Control

Mondays, there's this motivational saying where every day is a Monday. But you know what? That would really suck. Because for some people out there, Monday is the beginning of the worst next five days of their life. Now that's pretty damn depressing. So let's try and change that. Right, so this is the 2021 BMW 228i xdrive gran coupe. That's a lot of words for not a lot of car. Not dissing it or anything like that, but come on, we're talking about a non m all wheel drive, base trim 2 sedan. There's really not much to write home about. Then again, that's kind of what mundane Mondays are all about. The underdog, the race car in disguise. The car you buy your kids when you send them off to college. Hopefully. I'm not insulting anybody here, but a lot of you guys know that this is mainly a performance car channel. So either way, I do like giving the little guy a shot too. But mundane Mondays, it's gonna be more lax. You know, I'm still gonna inject a little bit of track day love, but for the most part I want more easygoing, not as scripted. So what that means is you might hear me ramble on for a little bit more, or you might hear me make dad jokes, or you might hear my wife over here talk about how great her X6 is, who knows? Yeah, I've been driving this car for a few days now. It's, it's an interesting piece. See, it sits on the bottom of the totem pole in terms of BMW's hierarchy. You know, you've got the X1, the X2, the 2, it's basically a budget BMW. Now that's. Budget is a, is a sort of relative wor. Subjective word because this car starts at about 37 and a half thousand dollars for the xDrive model. This particular car I think is about 41. And you know, that's not cheap, that's not budget when you think about the word budget. But hey, you know, maybe you just really like the two series or you just can't afford anything else or you live in the city, I don't know. But that's, that's actually not true because BMWs are really affordable. If you think about probably one of the best leasing luxury cars out there, you can probably get this car in the mid-3002 per month if you work your cars right. Not a financial advisor or salesman or anything like that, but that's just my opinion of this car. Now one of the caveats is that with this budget model, you get BMW's slowest possible combustion engine, and that's the 2 liter turbocharged inline four. That makes a whopping 228 brake horsepower and 258 pound feet of torque. And, you know, not bad. But what is bad is the list of curb weight. And it's 3550 pounds. 3500 pounds for what is a subcompact sedan is to me, it's ridiculous. I think that gets me angry. Like, why is this car so heavy? What is the point? It's not like it's filled with leather, there's no heated seats. There is a two liter four cylinder engine. It's not like a big V8 because if you think about it, my Corvette Z06 that weighed 3,600 pounds or 3,500 pounds because it had a big V8. You know, Mustang GTs weigh about 3,700 pounds. Big V8. So why does this little four banger weigh almost 3,600 pounds anyway? You'll have me rambling all day about that. Let's talk about something else though. The performance. There aren't too many figures out there in terms of, you know, anything beyond a zero to 60 time because, well, I don't think anybody really cares. It's, it's. It's a daily driven kind of beater. Not a beater car. It's a. It's. It's just not. It's not a performance car. Right. So I don't think anybody really focuses too much on that. However we do. Specifically me, I love that kind of stuff. So what I want to do at some point in this episode, we're gonna take it to our airstrip and we're gonna do some really crazy high speed runs with it to see what kind of times it puts down in the real world. What I don't get though is they make a 230i for the coupe version of this car and that has 20 more horsepower. Why couldn't they just jump that over to this? You know, that would have made a lot more sense. 225. Wait, what? 220. I'm such a terrible Asian. 250 horsepower, right? So it's about 200, 248 horsepower, you're looking at. That would, that would make this car really fun and then actually would just demolish it in terms of the competition. Because I feel like what BMW did was they downrated this car so that it can play ball with the likes of the A3 and the CLA.250. And that's basically what this car competes against. So like the, the A3 makes like 228 horsepower as well, but then the CLA 250 makes like 221 or something like that. So BMW could have easily just blown them out of the water, used the 230i engine and had 248 horsepower. It would have been magnificent. But hey, it is what it is. But in terms of just the competition, I feel like BMW always sits right in the middle in terms of price point because the A3 is I think 36 grand for the all wheel drive and then the CLA 250 is 37,8. So like basically a little bit more than this car. Enough about, you know, just the theoreticals and the information you get on the Internet. How does this car drive? Well, let's start with the fact that BMW loves to pride themselves in calling it the ultimate driving Mach. And yeah, they do a pretty good job. Even this two series, I feel like, you know, it's a little numb overall, but it's not terrible. You know, I'm in comfort mode right now and I can say that the suspension isn't overly harsh. It isn't very plush either. That's to be expected. It's fixed rate, it's not adjustable. There's no adaptive suspension like in, you know, in our X6 or whatever like that. It's kind of just a tiny bit stiff. But it's way better than our old Mazda. It's Nothing like our X6. The closest thing I can compare it to is maybe the E6535. So it's definitely drivable wherever you need to go. You know, there's a lot of bumps that we kind of go over, not here, but like parts of our journey that's just unbearable. But this, this makes it kind of okay. In comfort. The steering is quite numb. There's a little bit of delay before actually anything really happens. So. So even if I go into sport mode, it's just really adjusting the throttle response, engine response, I guess. The steering tightness. And the transmission. Speaking of the transmission, it's. I don't know what it is, but it's an eight speed auto and it doesn't shift great. You know, if I get on it, it's. It's kind of like my Barth 124. Maybe just a hair better in terms of just responsiveness and shift speed. The downshift situation is okay too, but you don't really hear any exhaust note either. It's pretty quiet. And that's a love hate thing because on one hand, BMW loves to pipe in exhaust noise to make you feel more like a man. But on the other hand, it's just like sometimes I just want to be a man. I don't want to, you know, I don't want the car to make me feel manlier. But hey, this is okay. I think this is fine. I'm okay with it being quiet because it's not trying to be something it's not. Let's talk about the X drive. This is an all wheel drive car, but it feels like a front bias all wheel drive system. If you throw it into a corner at 8, 10, it'll handle pretty well because what it feels like is the front wheels turning almost immediately and it gives you that very nice, sharp turn in. However, at the limit at 1010, there is absolutely understeer, which is a given. You can't avoid that. But then again, let's go back to the whole thing where it's just like, come on, guys, this is a 228. I, you know, who's tracking this thing? Who cares about who's driving this to the limit and understeering into a wall? Nobody, except for maybe me. But it's, it's fun to drive. Okay, so it's not a track car. If I put this on a track, I will be immensely disappointed. However, it is quite entertaining to drive around some back roads. You can push it, it'll feel confident. But other than that, I think there's not much to talk about in terms of sportiness. And on top of that, the fuel economy. Let me, don't even get me started on that because I've been trying to get this thing down empty for like the past four days now. And I've been in Sport plus. When there's no Sport plus, it's just sport. But I've been in sport traction off. I've been in sport shifting mode. I've been pretty much just being a hooligan all around town and I've gone down maybe like a bar, maybe two. Then on top of that, I tried to, I tried to. I just left it on for like 24 hours and went down one more bar. So, Philly, I don't know what the actual EPA rating on this car is, but it's pretty damn good. You know what, I might be biased because I spend a lot of my time in cars with like, you know, 6.2 liter V8s that, you know, sip fuel like it's whiskey. I Might not be the best judge of fuel economy in terms of the interior. I think I might have mentioned this or maybe I didn't, but it does not have heated seats and it doesn't have a full digital dash. It's this kind of like faux pseudo digital thing going on here because you can see like these little gauges, they're still analog. If you look at it like when they're off or when there's light beaming in, you can still see the backdrop where you can see the actual analog kind of. I don't know how to explain it, but the analog motors or whatever the problem with that is you've got competitors like Audi and Mercedes with their complete digital dashes. And at that point it's just, you're blown out the water. Because the Audi one is gorgeous. They've been gorgeous for like three years. The Mercedes one is super cool because it's pretty much almost the same thing as the one in the G wagon. And you know, it's, it just feels premium. This just feels like a small upgrade from our old Mazda. And that's not what I want to feel when I'm paying almost double the price. The only thing that BMW does well is that they have wireless CarPlay. And I don't know if what other car company does this, but I know BMW does it because our X6 has it, the M4CS has it, this car has it, which is nice. You don't have to connect your phone to a physical wire for it to, you know, project to your navigation. And I really appreciate that. And it's just anytime I get into the car, CarPlay works just like that. But I'm glad this thing has paddles though. Check it out. I've got the same paddles as, I don't know, an M340i RX6. The same kind of like they're not terrible paddles, but they suffer the same kind of problem where I need to really grip the steering wheel and have really long fingers to get to them. I can say that it's not too terrible. The steering wheel, not the biggest fan of the materials aren't that great. I don't know, there's just something about it. Just doesn't feel very premium. Ultimately, the interior of this car, I don't know, it just, it's, it's confused. I think over here you've got a lot of more expensive looking stuff. Like this is the same kind of layout in our X6, right? So this is cool, I guess. Makes me feel kind of annoyed that I didn't get the glass crystal option for our X6 because now I feel like I'm driving in a 2 series all the time in a hundred thousand dollar car but I mean then at the same time I'm also glad I didn't get it because remember that one time when we were in like Spain and we got the glass option in our M850i and the sun like beamed in into the crystal hit me in the face and then we almost ended up off the cliff but yeah let's not talk about that and we were driving up mountain road yeah it was exciting exciting times but surprisingly this car is you know it's a subcompact car but there's quite a lot of usable room in the back you've got enough room for a baby seat comfortably probably a little bit more than we did in our Mazda which is surprising because I think the cars are almost the same length but you get a little bit more leg room back there like I said it's not.