Car shopping has certainly changed over the last few years. You no longer have to go to the dealer or used car lots. The internet brought us services like AutoTrader that make finding a car with all the right options a breeze. CarMax took the “fun” out of car buying with no haggle pricing and many dealers have now followed their lead. Now with services like Carvana & Vroom you can buy and sell a car from the comfort of your own home.

All these options come in handy when you are looking for a car like the BMW M2 in a manual transmission. When searching in my price range I would typically find 100 cars to choose from nation wide and several of those would be in the metro Atlanta area. Filtering my search by cars with manual transmission reduces the list to 30-40 cars around the country and most of those weren’t actually 6-speed manual cars but DCT (Dual Clutch Transmission) cars.

The car manufacturers have worked hard to convince the public that dual clutch transmissions are manual transmissions you shift automatically without the use of a clutch pedal. Porsche kicked this off with their PDK transmission in 2009. By all accounts the modern automatic transmission is faster than the manual version as shifts only take a fraction of the time a human can row through the gears.

Call me old fashion but I wanted to learn to push my car to the limits with an “old fashion” manual transmission. So my list of BMW M2 search results would only yield 10-15 cars with an actual 6-speed manual. Color and options were secondary to the transmission and the price of the car. After searching for a month or so, I found two 2017 Long Beach Blue M2s with 6-speed manual transmissions that might be winners. Both cars happened to be in the Houston area.

The first one was at a non-BMW dealer that came in on trade. It didn’t have the option package (in 2017 you either got the options or you got the standard car) but only had 19,000 miles. It did have a small ding on the rear bumper. On paper and in pictures this was a great car for me as it was priced to sell at $38,500. The second car did have the option package but it had 34,000 miles and was priced at $40,000. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first but I liked the look of the second car better.

For a car that will get used at the track, I was still leaning toward the first car with a lower price and lower mileage as I knew I would have plenty of expenses getting myself and the car track ready. As I looked closer at the second car, it was some of the cosmetic changes the previous owner did that made the car look better to me. It had the all black grill, black M logos and the body color side reflector delete. It also had tinted windows along with the Dinan performance exhaust system already installed.

Since the first car wasn’t at a BMW dealer and wouldn’t get a complete overhaul by BMW techs I had a PPI (pre-purchase inspection) done at a local independent BMW specialist. While the car was mechanically sound it had several other minor blemishes to the body and paint work. The kicker was major curb rash on the front splitter. After the dealer was unwilling to take a few bucks off or have the car repaired I went with the second car.

Ricardo and the team at Advantage BMW Midtown in Houston took great care of me. I called him to make a deposit on the car on Thursday with the caveat that the car would be ready to pick up on Saturday afternoon as I was already planning on being in Houston. They ran the M2 through their pre-purchase reconditioning in a couple days. This process typically takes a week or more. When we arrived at Advantage BMW there was my freshly washed and waxed M2 ready for delivery. After a quick test drive and signing a few docs, my wife and I were on our way to New Orleans on the M2’s first road trip.