Ow! My Balls!

The 2026 BMW M2 CS is a brilliant car, perhaps one of the best I've driven all year. The pairing of its 523-horsepower twin-turbocharged inline-six engine with its ultra-quick and precise steering made it an absolute joy to pilot down the road. I found myself looking for any reason to get behind its thick steering and go for a drive — waking up at the crack of dawn for blasts up the Palisades Parkway to Harriman State Park before the local cops had gotten up yet, multiple times throughout the week.

The M2 CS is one of those cars I'll be thinking about for a long, long time, but that doesn't mean it isn't without issue. No, I'm not talking about the fact it doesn't have cupholders (dumb) or the fact that its tiny gas tank means any sort of spirited driving will require a premature stop at a gas station as fuel economy drops into the single digits. I'm here to talk about how the M2 CS pulverized my balls.

Andy Kalmowitz / Jalopnik

Doing this job, you sit your ass in a lot of seats. Some are comfier than others, but few are less comfy than the M Carbon Bucket seats BMW fitted to the M2 CS. Not only are they hard and unsupportive, something that isn't really ideal if you want to drive a lot, they're also damn snug. Forget the hip and torso issue. I know I'm a bigger dude. I'm 6-foot-1 and about 217 pounds with semi-broad shoulders, so narrower seats are always a bit of an issue for my body type. However, those upper-half issues pale in comparison to the trials and tribulations my lower half went through over the 350 miles I drove the CS.

Full Disclosure: BMW lent me a fully fueled 2026 M2 CS to do with as I pleased for a week.

It would seem that those M Carbon Buckets, which did a commendable job of holding my thunder thighs in place, were designed with the express purpose of making sure I can't have children in the future. They achieved this through a two-pronged attack on my nethers, the likes of which have only been seen on early seasons of "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Jackass."

The lesser of the two evils was the side bolsters BMW fitted to these seats. They're as stiff, unforgiving and aggressive as they look, and they seem to exist only to prevent the idea of manspreading from ever even entering my mind. Basically, they kept my thick, hearty Eastern European thighs clamped together, and I will spare you the details, but I got squished. Adding insult to injury is that the right-side bolster is positioned in such a way that my right leg doesn't line up with the gas pedal, causing some fairly substantial discomfort after an hour or so of driving.

Andy Kalmowitz / Jalopnik

The bolsters really aren't the main issue, though. That honor is reserved for the truly insane Nut Cruncher 3000s that BMW decided to fit at the front of the seat bottom. I can't exactly work out what it's supposed to be for. Maybe it's just design. Maybe it's for mounting a harness in the car. I don't know, and I don't care, because it left me sterile. Who would have thought that having your low hangers pushed up against a hard piece of carbon fiber would lead to discomfort? Not BMW's designers and engineers, that's for sure.

Andy Kalmowitz / Jalopnik

When you combine the seats with the stiff springs, 0.3 inches of lower ride height and the harsh ride that the M2 CS provides, it's hard to think the M2 CS wants to see me bring another life into this world.

Sure, the M Carbon Buckets look cool, and they allowed me to sit so low in the car that they allowed me to feel like I was actually connected to the M2 CS's chassis itself. But with what they have done to my reproductive organs, the M2 CS might be the last thing I'm ever physically connected to. Still, with its ducktail wing and sweet, sweet exhaust note, I think it may have been worth the sacrifice.