► BMW M goes electric
► EV sports car being tested
► Trialling quad motor setup
BMW is prepping an all-electric M car that’ll break the 1000bhp barrier, and our spy photographers have caught it testing – sort of. Rather than the finished car itself, we’ve got pictures of an experimental mule that features not one or two, but four motors.
The mutant mule car pictured is based on the BMW i4, but wears the face of the M3 and M4, and BMW says it’s trialling a quad-motor powertrain, meaning one motor per wheel for huge power figures and all-wheel drive. BMW has been testing software that can control and deploy power from these four motors all at once. CAR understands the powertrain could make north of 1000bhp.
If you’re thinking BMW’s already made electric M cars, you’re sort of half right. The brand has made M Performance cars, in the shape of the i4 M50 ,iX M60 and upcoming i7 M70. Whatever this electric M car ends up being, we know it’s a purely M product, not a half-way house.
‘Electrification opens up completely new degrees of freedom for us to create M-typical dynamics,’ says Dirk Häcker, M’s head of development, ‘and we can already see that we can exploit this potential to the maximum, so that our high-performance sports cars will continue to offer the M-typical and incomparable combination of dynamics, agility and precision in the locally emission-free future.’
The brand has confirmed it’s working on a zero-emission entry to its M division for some time, even working with composer Hans Zimmer to develop a specific M sound that’ll be played through the speakers under acceleration.
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