Megawatt BMW M3 could lead BMW M’s EV charge

BMW’s M performance division won’t lose its high-powered prestige with the move to battery-electric power, with a senior BMW executive teasing that an M EV could boast a full megawatt (1000kW) of power.

A full-blown hyper-EV from BMW M could also deliver 0-100km/h acceleration in the high two-second range, all-wheel drive traction and all-paw torque vectoring via four electric motors in a quad-motor powertrain like the one BMW has already teased.

The bad news is the first all-electric M rocketship probably won’t be available until the mid to late 2020s.

While BMW M president Frank van Meel has been tight-lipped about the zero-emission future of the German performance brand, BMW’s board member for development, Dr Frank Weber, hinted on Friday that a quad-motor EV powertrain could power future high-performance M models, and even said it was technically possible for M’s most popular model, the BMW M3.

Asked at a round table about whether a BMW EV could ever be a super high-performance car capable of 300km/h, Dr Weber said: “I think you will see an M3 like that.”

“I think it was seen as the most demanding vehicle that we have as a real high-performance product.

“This [the M3] can also be the dual-motor architecture and this can be four-motor architecture with four 250kW motors for up to one megawatt.

“Imagine what you could do with an M3?” he said.

To be fair to Dr Weber, he was slightly tripping over himself in enthusiasm for the high-powered potential of BMW’s Neue Klasse EV architecture, which will debut in 2025, most likely beneath an all-new 3 Series, and a megawatt M3 is extremely unlikely.

The price point alone of the M3 compared to more expensive M models makes a quad-motor M3 less and less rational.

But the beaver-faced G80-series BMW M3 didn’t launch until last year, so an all-new M3 isn’t due into production until at least 2027 or 2028, coinciding with the timing Dr Weber expects for solid-state battery technology to finally become a production reality.

“What you can expect from this new class of BEV architecture is not only flexibility within your high-voltage battery, which can take cylindrical batteries, lithium-ion-phosphate battery cells and solid-state batteries in the same casing, it can be more than a super-efficient, single-motor architecture.

“It can have a motor for each wheel if you want it to, for pure performance.

“The Generation VI goes to bigger cells with 20 per cent more efficiency. The cylindrical form of battery has very high energy density and the same pack can also accommodate prismatic cells, with lithium-ion phosphate chemistry coming on line.

“But our high-voltage battery can also do larger prismatic formats that will be all solid-state.

“Availability of a real series product, we don’t know, but by the middle of the decade it will start and first series production will be built by the end of the decade.

“So we will use cylindrical for high energy, prismatic for lithium-ion phosphate and all solid-state for even larger cells and they will all be possible within our cluster.”

BMW sources have hinted strongly that the next-generation BMW M5 will be powered by the potent plug-in hybrid twin-turbo V8 powertrain from the upcoming stand-alone M model, the BMW XM.

That would give BMW M the option of giving the next M5 either 480kW of power and 800Nm of torque, or 550kW and 1000Nm – or both – and an 80km WLTP EV range.

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