BMW 1M: The perfect blend?

Life, it seems, has become frightfully complicated. And when it’s not busy being complicated, it’s busy not working. Whether it’s trying to get an appointment with your GP, figuring out why you can receive but no longer send emails, an unexpected item in the bagging area or what new and inexplicable reason has made your car direct a reproachful bong in your direction, it’s just getting harder by the minute.

Doesn’t it make you crave for simpler times when everything in general and cars in particular just worked? There are of course some that still do, and in its loyalty to six-cylinder engines, manual gearboxes and correct-wheel drive, BMW is still clinging to the institutions that first made its cars great to drive most of a lifetime ago.

But the simplest and best of its current enthusiast machines, the M2 (a car Dan has been running for the past few months), still bleats at you every time you exceed the speed limit. Yes you can turn it off, but the moment you stop for so much as a pee, snack or tank of gas, you’ll have to turn it off all over again the next time you climb aboard.