Stand-alone M sports model not in the charts for this Bavarian star
Mis busy upgrading its production cars and developing its M Performance brand, says BMW Group sales and marketing director Ian Robertson.
Its German rivals launched their second-generation standalone sports cars over the past two years, with MercedesBenz’s AMG delivering the short, sharp GT and GT S coupe and Audi Sport bringing its second R8 and R8 Spyder to market.
Yet BMW’s M has stood firm, without a stand-alone model since the 1981 M1, and led still by the overweight M5, the overwrought M6, an M3-M4 pairing perilously close to GT territory and a host of hotted-up SUVs.
The real driver’s flagship in the range is acknowledged as the M2, the first car fully developed under the reign of M boss Franciscus van Meel.
BMW does have a swoopy coupe to rival Porsche’s 911, but it chose to deliver that car as a flagship for its eco-friendly i brand, with a carbon fibre architecture and a plug-in hybrid powertrain featuring a threecylinder petrol motor.
“We have no plan at the moment for a stand-alone M car, like Audi or AMG,” Robertson says.
“M is simply too busy. If you look at M and the work it has done, a lot of the development has been with M Performance, and it’s the same with i and the plug-in hybrids over pure electric vehicles.
“You ask me why there is such a gap between the i3 and i8 and the next stand-alone i car (the iNext in 2021). The i brand has been busy electrifying the rest of BMW’s models.”
M’s noncore work has seen a triple turbo in-line six-cylinder diesel and now a fourcompressor V8 diesel, along with a range of machines to bridge the performance gap between conventional BMW cars and the go-fast M cars.
AMG morphed the McLaren collaboration that delivered the underwhelming SLR into its own in-house SLS and then the GT. Pointedly, the AMG boss who drove the SLS development was Ola Källenius and his chief engineer was Tobias Mueller. Källenius is now Daimler’s board member for development, while Mueller is the chairman of AMG.
Over in Neckarsulm, Audi leaned on its Lamborghini ownership to share one architecture between the R8 and the Gallardo — and, in the second generation, the Huracan. It will also deliver a cheaper R8 in 2017 or 2018, with a Porsche-developed turbocharged 2.9l V6 motor.
While all of this is going on, M is simply doing what it has always done — turning production BMW sedans and coupes into production M sports sedans and sports coupes or GTs.
It could have gone another way, Robertson says, but the board decided the stand-alone coupe was better served delivering a halo car for electrified mobility rather than another fast petrol-powered coupe.
“I was clear that if we were bringing in an i8, we should not have another one based on it or competing with it from M.
“The i8 is a completely new interpretation of sports cars. We should never confuse that.”
THE I8 IS A COMPLETELY NEW INTERPRETATION OF SPORTS CARS. WE SHOULD NEVER CONFUSE THAT