When will we see an electric BMW M car? We speak to its boss to find out

LISBON, Portugal—Last week we wrote about driving a pair of new M-badged electric BMWs. With the arrival of the i5 M60 and the iX M70, there are now go-fast variants of all four of BMW’s battery-electric vehicles. But as BMW will openly admit, those aren’t really true M cars. That’s not to say that BMW’s M Division is afraid of electrification—last year it debuted the XM, a performance plug-in hybrid SUV. And next year the XM’s powertrain will reappear in a plug-in hybrid M5. But when might we see a purely electric M car?

Luckily for us, Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M, was on hand in Portugal to sit down and talk about the future of M performance and electrification. And, as it turns out, we might see a fully electric BMW M car in plenty of time before the end of this decade.

“Well, if you look on social media, you can already see our mule test car with quad motors, because for us that is a very promising concept for high performance,” van Meel said, referring to recently released photos of a BMW i4 EV with the license plate M HP 4 E.

“Up till now we have introduced a lot of M performance vehicles when you say I want to have more power, sportier setup, but not a track tool, because then it’s too uncomfortable with too many, maybe, compromises,” he continued, referring to cars like the i4 M50, i5 M60, iX M60, and i7 M70.

“And if you go to high performance, we always say it is developed on the track for the track, and we also look at future race cars that will be purely electric and they have to be able to have continuous power output to have the right dynamics and also enough range,” van Meel explained.

Twin-motor RWD, quad-motor AWD

Although that current quad-motor EV in testing uses the current CLAR architecture, the first proper M EV will need to wait for the Neue Klasse, BMW’s next EV architecture that arrives in 2025. Right now, BMW’s architecture includes a domain controller for vehicle dynamics, which it calls a “hand of god,” that constantly monitors the car’s movements in three dimensions in order to optimize the handling.

“With a quad-motor concept we are now looking into a hand of god logic that also has the drive performance—so the drivetrain as well as the chassis systems in one central logic. And with four e-motors, we can also do ABS braking with electric motors instead of brake discs so we can get back a lot of energy and up to 30 percent or more range on the track. So these are things we’re currently looking at as well for future race cars as for high performance vehicles,” he said.

Interestingly, a quad-motor BMW M EV might not be the only recipe in van Meel’s cookbook. The company is also considering a twin-motor, rear-wheel drive layout. This one sounds instinctively appealing to me, since it means less weight over the nose of the car and front wheels, which only have to steer, not also deploy power.

Electric powertrains still need a little more work before M will be happy. “It’s not only about big electric motors, I think that’s the easiest thing—you can take them from trains, they have very strong electric motors. The principle has been on the market for more than 100 years. But the trick is to make electric motors very light, very powerful, very compact, but at the same time, you also have to have the right cooling so that they can keep up their performance,” van Meel told us.

The car’s high-voltage traction batteries also have to be capable of providing sustained power to the motors without overheating or derating. “We have an overall battery concept in the Neue Klasse that is able also to be fitted with other chemistry in the battery for more power and also for additional cooling for our M applications. It’s a lot of work already being done, but it’s going to be more interesting in the future once you see how that works out. I don’t want to say too much about that, but it’s obvious we are really working hard on that,” he said.

Coming soon-ish

Van Meel even gave us a timeline of sorts. “It will still take a couple of years,” he said. “You need to have the right car architecture to make the ideal setup, and we’ve been working on that for now more than two years already in context of Neue Klasse to prepare everything so that we can build a high-performance M vehicle based on [that architecture].”

“That’s why the electronic architecture of the Neue Klasse, it has this “heart of joy” that we communicated, which actually is necessary for us, but it also helps the Neue Klasse also with three, two, or one motor concepts because with that logic, it’s independent from how many electric motors you have,” van Meel said.

So if you’re the sort of person who might want an all-electric M3, start saving now, because we’re probably going to see one in 2027 or 2028.