Electric M cars to leave ICE in the dust

Wednesday, 11 March 2020

The high-performance electric arena is a hot one. You have the likes of Porsche, Rimac and Pininfarina pumping out cars with insane outputs on what feels like a regular basis. Even more vanilla EVs are blistering, with Tesla in particular shaking a lot of foundations with its various offerings.

That means, despite how much experience one may have in creating go-fast combustion vehicles, the new rulebook really does dictate 'go big or go home.' That means BMW and its M division has a pretty big job ahead of it in order to keep up.

Daniel Schmidt spoke to motoring.com.au recently and confirmed that this decade will be when we'll start seeing electrified M cars.

The Vision M Next could end up as M's first standalone performance car, as well as the performance division's first fully electric model.

Not only that but he reckons that 'in that timeframe, we will have the technologies on hand in order to deliver similar if not even better performance than we have today with a regular combustion engine.'

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There are a lot of ultra-high-power EVs out there now, despite their tiny production runs, like the Rimac Concept_Two here.

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At the moment, the hottest M car is the M8 Competition, which makes 460kW and 750Nm of torque and will hit 100kmh in a mere 3.2 seconds.

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'Technology will improve, weight will come down and even more so the efficiency and energy density of the high-voltage [battery] cells,' explained Schmidt.

Right now, M's most potent offering is the M8 which, in Competition spec, makes 460kW and 750Nm of torque. It'll hit 100kmh in a mere 3.2 seconds thanks to its all-wheel drive system. That's certainly not slow but in the world of megawatt-plus electric powertrains and 0-100kmh times below two seconds, it's a bit behind.

Schmidt said the biggest challenge for M will be balancing power and range in order to remain the go-to track weapon. Motoring suggested a goal range of five full-power laps of the Phillip Island circuit.

One key to this will be BMW's new Battery Cell Competence Centre in Munich. Here, BMW engineers are working to both improve current battery technology and create new breakthroughs in the field. Its aim is to double the current battery density with a new solid-state battery.

As for the actual car, BMW development boss Klaus Fröhlich previously indicated he wants a 450kW M1 successor on the market this decade, although it's unclear what powertrain it may use.

It could be based on the BMW Vision M Next concept from last year, which uses a four-cylinder plug-in hybrid powertrain to generate 441kW.

In the meantime, BMW's upcoming i4 coupe will help plug the gap between the urban i3 and the upcoming all-electric supercar. The i4 will offer 600km of range and 390kW generated by a single motor mounted on the rear axle. You can still buy the plug-in i8 too, although the model will discontinued in April.