Dave Moore.

WITHIN a year or so, BMW’s entry-point cars will share their platforms with a whole new arMinis, which means that a few exceptions, the company’s least expensive cars will be front-wheel-drive.

This might be a shock to some, but it has to be remembered that Mercedes-Benz made its shift to front drive for its smaller cars more than 16 years ago and after a dozen years of building Minis, BMW has enough experience with such drive systems to invest its smallest offering from next year with the best front-wheel-drive platforms that money can engineer.

Meanwhile, the new BMW 2 Series Coupe shows that the German carmaker is a million miles from giving up its rear-driven history, picking up as it does the brief previously fulfilled by the 120i and 135i models whose nomenclature is having something of a redirection.

The two-door coupe raises the bar in the premium compact sector for both driving dynamics and aesthetic appeal, says BMW, and another thing it’s not giving up is in-line six-cylinder engines. The top performance version of the new range will use BMW’s TwinPower twin-cam six, which is used in every one of the company’s cars from the 2 Series upwards.

Diesel and petrol turbocharged fours are included in the 2 Series line-up with a further two engine options coming next year. All five eventual engines use TwinPower Turbo technology to deliver classleading performance and efficiency figures and consumption and emissions benefit further from BMW’s EfficientDynamics technologies that are standard across the