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      04-25-2013, 01:19 PM   #36
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Drives: Smog machines
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramos View Post
The results of this poll are no where near as close as I thought they would be.
Those who favor an I4 are a tiny minority of an enthusiast community. I would bet that they are even a smaller minority of the larger BMW buying population.

I am pretty certain that BMW's own market research would have come to the same conclusion... A 4 cylinder is simple marketing suicide for the M2, I think BMW is way smarter than that and will be fitting this car with a 350-370 HP Inline 6 / 3.0 liter Bi-Turbo (evolution of the N54 rather than an evolution of the N55)
Having worked in Germany and having plenty of friends in different countries, I think this is an extremely US-centric view. I realize we make up a good amount of total BMW sales, but I suspect that if this poll were more global, you'd see a closer balance in preference. I don't see the I4 winning in many cases, but I can see the number of folks not blindly favoring the bigger engine skewing way downward.

I also think that the market differentiation of having a relatively cushy, torquey M3/M4 and a more raw, peaky and challenging M2 would make more sense than having essentially two slices of the same pie. But then I'm not making these calls, and M has certainly changed a lot since the days of the E30 M3, so who knows what we'll actually see.
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