Why The Internet Is So Mad About This BMW’s New ‘M’ Badge

If any automaker’s caught flak on the internet for its own questionable decisions lately, it’s BMW. From bizarre styling to some excessively heavy products, there are plenty of reasons for enthusiasts to clown on the Bavarian brand, and here’s a new one. The 2025 BMW M235 sees the adoption of a new badge convention, and the culture has some feelings about it.

One notable difference is that there’s no more “i” for fuel injection as that letter’s now reserved for electric models. After all, every BMW with a combustion engine is fuel-injected now anyway. However, deletion of that letter isn’t what’s getting people in a puff this time, nor is the M prefix alone doing all the lifting in this instance of outrage.

Instead, BMW’s put the “35” bit of M235 in what can almost be described as subscript, and that’s rattled the cages of some enthusiast customers that BMW really shouldn’t be upsetting. Keep in mind, the M235 looks like a regular compact sedan and is based on a front-wheel-drive platform usually found under Minis. Not the most M thing out there, right?

Over on the populous BMW enthusiast forum Bimmerpost, things aren’t going well for the new M235, with specific mention of the badge. As one commenter who claims to own an M2 CS, one of the best modern M cars, wrote:

Now I skimmed the above in 10 secs, for the record…but screams to me as further dilution of the dedicated M brand…most telling from the rear end with the quad tips / big M2(small35)…soon enough, maybe we’ll make an M2 SUV as well and a 4 door 1 series! Really loved this brand…but with every new model release, that love is fading. Now, the real question – will my love affair with the E46 / E9X / F87 be impacted by the direction the brand is heading…a few years ago, I thought it didn’t matter…but that’s changing…

Yeah, it’s not so great when people who seem to buy actual halo products are putting a product on blast like this. Oh, and there’s a whole lot more where that came from.

Well, that’s a bunch of people with full-fat M cars in their signatures and bios and avatars putting the new M235 Gran Coupe’s badging on blast, and more importantly, they’re people with recent examples of those cars. If I were a brand, I wouldn’t want to upset those sorts of customers. Oh, and the distaste for this new badging convention doesn’t just stop at one forum.

On a post specifically about the badging in the private Facebook group Anti-BMW BMW Club, one commenter let the following rip:

Just when I thought the new 2 series couldn’t get any worse aesthetically. BMW is really going for every bad decision they can make.

The vitriol’s spilling over into real life, too. As a friend of David Tracy summed up the M235 Gran Coupe:

It’s an enormous poser. And BMW is pushing the posing. To make the 35 smaller font and essentially have an M2 badge on it is dismissing the meaning of the M badge even more than M Sport and M SUVs. Calling it an M235 was bad enough. There was a real M235i. I raced one

So, how did we get here? About a decade ago, BMW rolled out the first of what many enthusiasts call M-Lite models by replacing the 135i coupe with the M235i coupe. Yep, to cash in on the appeal of the M brand, BMW slapped M Sport goodies on a selection of higher-output not-full-M cars, slapped the M badge in front of three-digit names, and proceeded to collect checks. It was still controversial back then, but at least the initial approach had some level of exclusivity to it. At the time, few predicted that the M2 would happen, and with the 2 Series coupe being the smallest rear-wheel-drive BMW sold in America, the M-Lite was a neat consolation prize.

However, over the past decade, the M-Lite branding has expanded to just about every model in BMW’s lineup. It’s weird to see a motorsport badge on a giant X7 SUV, or an electric 5 Series that’s not track-focused in the slightest, but it’s not as weird as seeing this new badge configuration.

By badging the 35 bit of the M235 in differing font sizes, BMW appears to be trying to tie this entry-level sedan in with an actual performance car that already exists. See, there is an actual BMW M2, and it’s a 453-horsepower rear-wheel-drive sports coupe with an available manual transmission, a limited-slip differential, beefy brakes, stiff suspension, and all the sort of serious hardware you’d expect from an M car. It’s about as far away from a stretched Mini sedan in Dodge Dart-aping bodywork as you can get, and if anything, minimizing the engine description numbers on the M235’s badge and seemingly trying to lump this sedan in with the M2 coupe is more likely to hurt the M brand than help the sales of this particular car. Add in the perspective that this badging makes it seem that being a BMW alone wouldn’t make the M235 sporty enough, and that ought to worry important people in Munich.

BMW’s identity for most of the past 50-plus years has been as a maker of performance luxury cars. Even many of the slower ones like the E30 318i still drew acclaim for the way they drove, and there was this sense of authenticity that permeated the lineup. No matter whether you bought a 3 Series or a 7 Series, it would still drive like a BMW. That was the defining characteristic, the thing that made BMW a success story, partly because authenticity is cool. Even yuppies knew that, and in their cosmopolitan greed-is-good pursuit of the finer things in life, they helped elevate cars like the E30 3 Series from curious foreign automobiles to new status symbols.

Zoom in on 2024, and the current BMW lineup is known more for controversial styling than providing an outstanding driving experience. Well, controversial styling combined with heavy performance cars and a focus on gadgets. Many long-time BMW enthusiasts aren’t fans of this current direction, but that doesn’t matter because BMW’s market share is still rising. Last year was BMW’s best-ever sales year in America, and at the end of the day, that’s what keeps the lights on.

However, it might not necessarily keep the lights on this brightly forever. See, mainstream luxury brands need people to buy and covet their high-end halo cars because those actions reinforce status. Devaluing the M badge in turn devalues the BMW badge, and if the customers that make a brand desirable start to leave, well, you kind of end up with Cadillac circa 1998.

As it stands, BMW isn’t the same sort of enthusiast brand it once was. The only constant is change, and sometimes your old favorites move on from catering to your needs. The badging on the M235 is just a symptom of change, a new direction that’s working for now, but may or may not work forever. After all, if you want to know what the yuppies who made BMW big in North America drive today, just ask your local Porsche salesperson.

(Photo credits: BMW, Bimmerpost, Facebook)

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