A New Manual BMW M4 Is Half A Human Heavier Than The Old M4 DCT

In recent years we have - to an extent - seen a reversal of the weight-gaining trend in the car industry. The brand new BMW M4, however, isn’t a car that’s managed to trim the fat relative to its predecessor.

In this new (for some reason portrait) YouTube video from BMW, various weight-saving measures are detailed. The crankshaft, for instance, is now 1.5kg lighter, dropping the overall figure while increasing the ‘S58’ turbo inline-six’s responsiveness. The luridly-coloured carbon fibre sports seats help the car lose an impressive 10kg meanwhile, and there’s an unspecified saving from the sound-proofing materials, which have been reduced “to a minimum”.

Even so, the new car has ended up being bulkier. Perhaps to avoid showing a huge gulf between the two, at the end of the video the weight of a DCT-equipped F82 M4 is compared with a manual G82 M4. With a full tank of fuel but the car otherwise empty, the automatic F82 is 1640kg, compared to 1674kg for the manual G82. As keen maths fans will point out, that’s a difference of 34kg, about half the weight of a lanky human like me.

The weight increase for the dual-clutch gearbox on the old M4 was about 40kg, making the like-for-like manual vs manual deficit 74kg. That won’t be as big when comparing auto vs auto though, with the eight-speed torque converter auto in the new M4 adding a more modest 25kg.

In conclusion, M3 and M4 function integration boss Klaus (we’re not given a surname) reckons the result is a “great weight for a vehicle whose dimensions have grown decisively and has to fulfil all the new legal requirements”. And for what it’s worth, the G82 is still comfortably lighter than a Mercedes-AMG C63 coupe, at least until the M4 rival’s lovely 4.0-litre V8 is ditched.