Car: BMW M135
Words: Tim Warren
Photos: Nabulen Ignacio
March 2025
The BMW M135, a fun little pocket rocket that’s brilliant round town, does a stand up job on the open road. Definitely don’t mistake this for a regular round town run about, M135, can do zero to 100 in 4.9 seconds putting it in the fairly exclusive sub 5 second club. The two litre turbocharged 221 kilowatt 400 Newton meter mill does a fine job of propelling this compact as fast as you need. BMW M badges mean a couple of things these days. If there’s a single number after the M, then it’s a really special car, the highest performance of the variety – EG M2, M3, M5 etc If there are more numbers after the M or before it, it means it’s a good one, but maybe not the most performant variety they have available. In this case, the M135 is a special one. BMW don’t use the M1 designation because that was the name of a wild mid-engined supercar they made in the 70s and early 80s. But as the smallest in their performance line, the M135 gets a larger M1 than the 35. So it’s M1’ish.
BMW’s design team have clearly been given a wider mandate recently, some of their smaller cars, such as this and the X3 have a distinctive style that I’ve got to like. Many M features like the larger 19 inch rims and glowing M badges on the sculpted sports seats and many other features to remind you this is special. This particular example came with a striking Veganza coral red/black interior with some funky diagonal in color stitching, which my dad did not like, yet I do.
Internally it’s very clean. Most controls have disappeared into the screen yet physical air vents and a few others remain. BMWs excellent voice control makes for great accessibility for the driver and the steering wheel is the tried tested one that’s been around for a generation. The only thing it’s missing is distance control for the adaptive cruise control. BMW driver assistance features are now getting very, very good with radar cruise control, one of my favorites in the business. Lane holding is subtle yet effective. Emergency braking that watches others on the road does a remarkable job, dare I say It has ensured many BMWs have remained scratch free. The phone integration entertainment options are generally seamless, although sometimes this model took a little bit of time to connect wirelessly, but when it did, it was flawless. The driver is blessed with a truly excellent heads up display that has virtually all information you’d possibly need available in it so you barely need to look away from the road.
While easy to maneuver, this car includes the very useful and capable parking feature to get you in and out of tight spaces. Many of your settings are saved against your BMW profile, which is managed through an app on your phone. Just make sure you select your profile before you start moving, because you can’t select it if you’re on the go. This includes entertainment phone connection options. So you are going to want to do this first thing.
Outside styling is more muted and the only thing that gives away that this is a potent little machine are the fancy wheels and the four exhaust tips. That’s right, it’s got one exhaust tip per cylinder.
But wait for the driving! It’s impressive. Most of the transmission settings are for every day but ‘sports’ is a huge change from the regular drive setting. You can still use the flappy paddles to flick into manual mode and the sport setting holds the engine in surprisingly high revs to optimize the RPM for the best operating window. Again, it’s really a big jump from the standard drive settings, you don’t want to engage it if you are noodling around town, but motorway or backroads it was ideal.
The M135 is a stout performer, holding its own with almost any car you wish to name while handling is more of the everyday type rather than an out and out sports weapon. So it’s sporty, but not too much sport. That said it’s more than enough to have legal fun, because if you’re pushing the handling limits of this car, you probably need to slow down.
The thing with this little car: it’s a great package with a bit of pizazz. It’s a joy around town, looks good on the outside, great on the inside. This version I drove was top spec, of course, there are other trim levels available if you need to tone it down. But why would you? It’s genuinely fun and practical at the same time, and will appeal to people who want a quality compact car that’s not compromised by its excellent performance. The 2025 BMW M135 is a competent, comfortable, enjoyable, all rounder.
