That’s the news. The more interesting story is what BMW did underneath, and what it did to the car you see in these photos.

Same face, very different bones

BMW has spent two years telling us it would build two 3 Series and make them look like one. As we laid out in April, the i3 is a clean-sheet Neue Klasse EV. The G50 is something else entirely: a heavily reworked evolution of CLAR, the longitudinal architecture under the outgoing G20, with updated B48 and B58 engines up front.

The shared design hides that well, but not perfectly, and the differences are where the car gets interesting. The two cars are nearly the same length, at 187.2 inches for the petrol car and 187.4 for the i3. But the G50 rides on a 112.6-inch wheelbase, a full 1.5 inches shorter than the EV’s. It’s also narrower and an inch lower.

The combustion car carries more overhang and more nose, and BMW’s own description mentions a “set-back greenhouse.” That’s the inline six asking for room. The i3 has no engine to package, so its wheels sit at the corners and its cabin can push forward. The G50 gets the long hood and rearward cabin that defined every 3 Series before it. Oddly, the car built on older bones has the more classically BMW proportions.

Mixing new sheetmetal with old architecture isn’t a new trick inside the BMW Group. MINI did the same with the current Cooper, where the electric J01 and the petrol F66 share a face and very little else. The difference here is scale. This is BMW’s most important car, and the stakes of getting the split right are considerably higher.

About all Those M Logos

The car in these photos is the M350 xDrive, and BMW has not been subtle about it.

There are optional yellow daytime lights, once reserved for CS and CSL cars and now explained as inspired by GT racers and the M Hybrid V8. There’s a standard rear spoiler, four tailpipes, and bi-colour Jet Black M wheels. The Iconic Glow kidney lighting is standard. Inside is an M steering wheel. The optional M Sport seats carry illuminated M logos that are deliberately visible from outside the car, through the windscreen and side glass. Tick the Digital Premium box and you get an M Drag Meter app on the Central Display.

This is not an M car. BMW describes it as the range’s entry point to BMW M, which is a careful way of saying it isn’t one. The yellow lights are the clearest example. On an M4 CSL they signalled something rare and hard-won. On a $65,900 sedan with an options list, they signal an options list. It’s a lot of badging for a car that doesn’t wear the full badge.

But set the costume aside for a moment, because the hardware underneath is more serious than the styling suggests.

The M350 xDrive is quicker than its predecessor by a wide margin

The engine is the latest B58, code B58B30M3. It’s a 3.0-litre inline six with a crankshaft-mounted 48V starter generator built into the transmission housing, and that generator contributes up to 17 hp on its own. Total output is 437 hp and 428 lb-ft, up from the M340i’s 386 hp. That works out to 145.7 hp per litre.

BMW has moved the engine to the Miller cycle and added switchable exhaust valves. Those valves cut engine drag torque by roughly two thirds, so the mild-hybrid system can recover much more energy when you lift off the throttle. New turbochargers account for much of the power gain. The official 0 to 60 mph time is 3.9 seconds, or 3.6 seconds measured the way American magazines usually measure it, with a one-foot rollout. Top speed is limited to 130 mph, or 155 mph with performance tyres.

The chassis work matters more than the numbers. Adaptive M Suspension, variable sport steering, the M Sport differential and M Sport brakes are all standard. BMW has added a strut tying the front towers to the front end and improved the anti-roll bar mounting, and it says both torsional and vertical rigidity are up significantly. The standard spoiler isn’t purely decorative; BMW says it reduces lift at speed. The M Sport and M Sport Plus drive modes are exclusive to this car.

Then there’s Drift Moment. It’s a rear-wheel-drive setting, selected on the Central Display and paired with DSC Off. An M-specific clutch strategy sends all drive to the rear axle. It’s the kind of feature that used to belong only to full M cars, and it’s genuinely welcome. The catch is that it doesn’t exist yet. Drift Moment arrives during 2027 as a software update, including for cars already delivered. Selling a car on a feature it will receive later is now standard practice across the industry, and BMW is no exception.

One number is worth sitting with: 4,169 lbs, with 54 percent of that weight over the front wheels. BMW’s press materials talk about near-perfect weight distribution for the petrol range. That holds for the four-cylinder cars. The M350 xDrive is noticeably nose-heavy by 3 Series standards, and the xDrive system and M differential will be working hard to hide it. As we noted when BMW confirmed the car, xDrive isn’t an option here. It defines the whole car.

The 330 might be the one that matters

The M350 xDrive gets the attention. The 330 is the car most people will actually buy, and it may be the purer 3 Series of the two.

It uses the B48B20O3, a 2.0-litre four with a belt-driven 48V starter generator, making 255 hp and 295 lb-ft. That’s essentially where the outgoing 330i left off, so the gains here are in efficiency rather than output. An eight-speed Steptronic is standard. Both the rear-drive 330 and the 330 xDrive reach 60 mph in 5.9 seconds.

The good news is that rear-wheel drive returns as the base configuration, at $49,900. At 3,827 lbs with a 52/48 split, it’s the lightest and best-balanced car in the range. It’s still roughly 245 lbs heavier than the rear-drive 2023 330i we tested. That weight gain is the price of the screens, the sensors and the extra size.

The chassis revisions are extensive. Tracks are wider and the wheelbase is longer than the G20’s. The front axle gets more caster trail and less camber. The five-link rear gets more camber and a revised caster setup. High-preload anti-roll bar mounts sit at both ends. Newly developed lift-related dampers are standard, and overall wheel diameter grows from 654 mm to 680 mm for better ride and traction. Staggered 245/255 tyre setups are available. Optional 20-inch wheels bring 275-section rear tyres.

Adaptive suspension and Adaptive M Suspension are both available, but only with sport steering, which uses a variable ratio. That’s a sensible pairing. Anyone buying adaptive dampers is probably also the buyer who wants the quicker rack.

There’s a subtle distinction in how the two 3 Series are controlled. The i3 gets the Heart of Joy, BMW’s centralised driving-dynamics computer, which runs ten times faster than previous systems. The petrol cars use what BMW calls an optimised Driving Stack, with functions spread across dedicated control units refined over decades. In plain terms, the EV gets the new brain and the combustion car keeps a proven one. For a sport sedan still built around mechanical grip, that may be no bad thing.

Inside, the future arrives regardless of fuel

Whatever is under the hood, the cabin is pure Neue Klasse, and it’s shared almost entirely with the i3. Panoramic Vision projects information across the full width of the lower windscreen. A 17.9-inch Central Display sits angled toward the driver, and a 3D head-up display is optional. Everything runs on BMW Operating System X, which is built on Android. There’s an Alexa+ powered voice assistant that BMW says can handle natural conversation rather than set commands.

The new steering wheel has a central upper spoke, a first for the 3 Series, and every petrol car gets shift paddles as standard. BMW has kept physical controls for volume, hazards, the parking brake and the rear defroster. Its materials say nothing about a rotary iDrive controller, and our earlier reporting pointed to its departure. That will be the biggest adjustment for existing owners, and the first thing long-time 3 Series drivers will judge the car on.

A panoramic glass roof is standard. Optional multifunction seats add ventilation on the petrol cars; the i3 gets massage instead. Driving Assistant Plus is standard. The optional Highway Assist allows hands-free driving on suitable highways at up to 85 mph.

A 3 Series from Dingolfing

For the first time in its modern history, the combustion 3 Series leaves Munich. G50 production starts at Dingolfing in November 2026, on the same line as the 4, 5 and 7 Series. This is actually a return: Dingolfing built 3 Series from 1980, before production consolidated elsewhere. Munich, where the E21 went into production in 1975, now builds the i3 and goes fully electric from 2027. Engines for both the four and the six come from Steyr in Austria.

BMW’s development chief Joachim Post is already calling it the best 3 Series of all time. That’s what every development chief says at every launch, and it’s for the road to decide.

What’s clear already is the shape of the bet. BMW has built one 3 Series for where the brand is going and one for the buyers it still has, and it has made them look almost identical. The M350 xDrive dresses up to make the petrol car feel special. The 330, rear-drive, four-cylinder and $49,900, may make that case better without any help from yellow lights. BMW has said combustion isn’t going anywhere, and the G50 is the car that has to show it meant it.

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That was the conclusion we kept circling back to after living with the M5 Touring this summer, and it has only hardened since. The G90 M5 is an extraordinary piece of engineering. It has 717 horsepower, 738 lb-ft of torque, near silent electric running for the school run and a V8 that can empty the horizon on request. It rides better than any M5 before it. It is also around 5,390 pounds, nearly 1,000 more than the F90 it replaced, and as we found in our first drive at the Performance Center, it’s a tick slower to 60 mph than that car despite the extra power.

None of that makes it a bad car. Quite the opposite, in fact. The new M5 is a breathtaking experience that embraces the duality hybridisation can bring. But the very soul of this new M5 is at odds with the singularity that BMW M has stood for in the past. Driving an M car daily used to demand dedication and even compromise. Today these cars ask nothing of you and deliver everything. To do so, they turn to synthetic means: electric power, sound from speakers rather than engines, and torque-vectoring all-wheel-drive systems that do their best to mask weight and driver inadequacy.

The M5 That Stopped Asking for Anything

Back in 2013, Albert Biermann told us not to be sad there wasn’t an M7, because the M6 Gran Coupe already was one. He was making a point about mission. The M6 Gran Coupe was a grand tourer that happened to be fast. The M5 was a sports saloon that happened to be comfortable. Those are different priorities, and for three decades M usually understood which came first.

The G90 flips the order. Luxury, isolation and technology lead, and the performance is engineered around them, often brilliantly. The steering is accurate but distant. The shove is enormous, but it arrives through a hybrid system whose character is managed rather than felt, with a soundtrack that leans on the speakers to fill in what the chassis won’t tell you. The car does everything. It just doesn’t ask much of you while doing it.

That is the real shift, and it’s bigger than one model. M cars used to be defined as much by what you gave up as by what you gained. The E28 M5 gave up presence so it could hide in plain sight. The E34 Winkelhock Edition gave up amenities to lose weight. The E46 M3 CSL gave up comfort for focus. Even the F10 M5 offered a six-speed manual in the US, and we spent a week in one knowing full well the DCT was quicker. People bought the manual anyway because involvement mattered more to them than a stopwatch.

The new M5 gives up nothing. That was the brief, and BMW met it.

When Everything Gets a Competition Badge

The problem is that the rest of the M lineup has drifted the same way, and the naming hasn’t kept up. Competition used to suggest something pared back. Today it mostly means more power and more equipment. CS has become a package of carbon, power and a price premium rather than a philosophy. Even the M4 CSL, the most purist statement M has made in years, shipped with an automatic and a very large touchscreen.

A crossover shouldn’t wear a competition badge. But we’d go further – a car with massaging seats shouldn’t wear a Competition badge. Not that we don’t love a highway massage but the essence of a competition giving up luxuries to get a level of focus not normally offered. This is about a naming strategy that should be both logical and aspirational.

Two Paths, Not One Compromise

What if M stopped trying to thread one needle and instead ran two lines with clear intent?

The first is what the M5 already is: performance luxury. Electrified, loaded, devastatingly fast and effortless to live with. Call it what it is, market it honestly, and let it chase the AMG GT 63 S E Performance buyer without apology. There is nothing wrong with this car. It simply shouldn’t have to carry the entire meaning of M on its shoulders.

The second is the one M has been hinting at with the manual M2 but never committed to. Lightweight, analogue, and built around the driver rather than the options list. That means a manual gearbox wherever it can be engineered in, a hard weight target that trumps feature creep, smaller wheels and tyres chosen for feel rather than spec-sheet grip, fixed-back seats, and a drastically shorter list of drive modes. No gesture control, no ambient lighting menus, no synthetic noise. Priced where it needs to be, sold in the numbers the market supports, and badged with something that means exactly one thing.

This isn’t a fantasy. Porsche sells the 911 GT3 Touring and the S/T alongside the Turbo S and nobody confuses them. Cadillac built the CT5-V Blackwing with a manual and turned it into the most talked-about American sports saloon in decades. The market for involvement is smaller than the market for everything, but it’s loyal, it’s vocal, and it’s the reason the M badge carries weight in the first place.

The Case Against, and Why It’s Weaker Than It Looks

The obvious counterpoint is that buyers are voting with their wallets. The M5 Touring is selling beyond expectations, and the people signing for them want the massage seats, the EV mode and the ability to haul a family at 190 mph. Regulation isn’t helping either. BMW has been clear that hybridisation was the price of keeping a V8 in the M5 at all, and a manual adds engineering and homologation cost to low-volume cars.

All true. But M already knows scarcity works. The F90 M5 CS listed at around $30,000 over a Competition-spec car, only 1,132 were built, and today they trade for tens of thousands more than a standard F90 of the same age. That isn’t just a collector bubble. It’s a signal that a meaningful slice of M customers will pay more for less, provided the less is real. Reports suggest a CS could arrive with the G90’s mid-cycle update, though nothing is confirmed. If it does, it will likely add power and carbon to a 5,000-pound hybrid. That’s a stronger M7, not a return to the idea.

What M Is For

The G90 is proof that M can build a car with no trade-off at all, and plenty of buyers will be very happy it did. What it can’t do is stand in for the other half of the brand’s identity, the half that made you choose, and rewarded you for choosing. BMW has built its M7. The more interesting question is whether it still wants to build the car that asks something back.

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It’s worth sitting with how long this took. WRT arrived with a genuine pedigree, a WEC-proven operation, a new North Carolina base, and an Evo-updated car with a smaller kidney grille and revised aero. Through the Rolex 24, Sebring, and everything since, the pace showed up in qualifying more than it showed up on Sunday. Four podiums this season is a respectable return for a first year with a new team, but podiums aren’t wins, and everyone involved knew it. Team boss Vincent Vosse said as much after the race, calling it “a really strong weekend” that started with a title in GT World Challenge Europe at Zandvoort and continued with this, the programme’s first GTP win, at the same track where the IMSA project was first discussed roughly a year ago.

Van der Linde’s move on Earl Bamber is the moment that will get replayed, but the more interesting story is what a win here does for the credibility of the switch itself. Ending a 17-year relationship with Bobby Rahal’s team is not a small decision, and BMW made it on the bet that consolidating GTP and WEC operations under one roof would eventually pay off in ways that mattered more than continuity. One win at Indianapolis doesn’t settle that argument on its own, but it’s the first hard data point in WRT’s favour, and it lands with two rounds left in the season and a full campaign’s worth of learning already banked for 2027.

There’s a secondary storyline that shouldn’t get buried under the GTP result. Turner Motorsport’s Robby Foley and Patrick Gallagher won GTD in the #96 BMW M4 GT3 EVO, the team’s first class win in more than two years, and it puts them into the points lead heading into the Road Atlanta finale. Paul Miller Racing’s sister car had the pace for a GTD PRO podium and instead got collected by rivals late in the race, dropping Neil Verhagen and Connor De Phillippi out of the points lead even as they stay in the title fight. Two BMW M4 GT3 EVOs fighting for two different championships at the season finale is a genuinely good problem to have, and it’s arguably a bigger story for the brand’s GT programme than a single GTP win.

Marco Wittmann’s race, by contrast, was the one nobody wanted. Contact with an Aston Martin while trying to pass, a drive-through penalty, and a public apology afterward turned what should have been a celebratory day for the #25 car into a footnote. It happens over a long season, and Wittmann owned it cleanly in his post-race comments, but it’s a reminder that BMW’s two-car GTP effort is still capable of taking points off itself as easily as off its rivals.

Road Atlanta in two weeks decides both the GTD and GTD PRO titles, with BMW represented in the fight for each. For GTP, the pressure is different: prove Indianapolis wasn’t a one-off before the season closes the book on WRT’s first year in charge.

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The E36 Compact was the last petrol hatchback BMW sold in North America, departing in the late 1990s. The i3 was a more modern chapter, a distinctive and genuinely innovative small EV that found a committed audience here before BMW pulled it from the market. What followed was a gap in the lineup that has gone unaddressed for the better part of four years. Credible signals are now emerging that at least one variant of the i1 is being evaluated for North America. Nothing is confirmed. But the combination of platform architecture, production location, and the i3’s proven market history makes the logic harder to dismiss than it might initially appear.

What the NB0 i1 Is

The i1 carries the internal codename NB0 and will enter series production in March 2028 at BMW’s Leipzig plant, with a production run expected through February 2036. It is a five-door electric hatchback replacing the lower end of the 1 Series lineup, sitting below the i3 sedan in BMW’s Neue Klasse range and representing the most compact application of the Gen6 platform to date.

Critically, the i1 and the combustion 1 Series successor are not the same car on different powertrains. They are two separate vehicles on two separate platforms sharing the same body. The electric i1 sits on the dedicated Neue Klasse rear-drive architecture. The combustion 1 Series carries on with an updated UKL2 platform and remains front-wheel drive. BMW is running a dual-platform strategy under a single nameplate, a decision that reflects both the engineering reality of optimising for each powertrain and a commercial need to serve markets at very different stages of EV adoption simultaneously.

Gen6: The Technical Case

The Gen6 architecture that underpins the i1 represents a genuine step change from current generation EV technology and it’s worth being specific about what that means in practice.

The platform uses cylindrical battery cells rather than the prismatic format of Gen5, delivering a 20% increase in energy density and a 30% improvement in range from the same physical package. BMW is targeting a minimum of 600 km WLTP range for the i1, a figure that would place it well above any current compact EV competitor and effectively eliminate range as a purchase objection in this segment.

The 800-volt electrical architecture enables DC fast charging at significantly higher rates than the current generation allows. The i3 sedan, the first Neue Klasse product to reach production, demonstrated what this means in practice: 10% to 80% charge in 21 minutes with 263 miles of range added in 10 minutes. The i1 operates at the smaller end of the battery range so absolute figures will be somewhat lower, but the architecture is identical and the improvement over anything the original i3 offered will be substantial regardless.

Rear-wheel drive is standard on the electric i1, with all-wheel drive available on higher specification variants through a dual-motor configuration. This is a deliberate return to BMW’s core dynamic identity in a segment where the brand last offered it in North America with the original i3, itself rear-wheel drive by virtue of its electric motor placement. The Neue Klasse platform is engineered around a rear-drive layout as its primary configuration, with front-wheel power available only through a second motor. That architecture produces handling characteristics that build on what made the i3 engaging to drive and takes it considerably further, with a floor-mounted battery delivering weight distribution the original i3’s range-extender layout could never achieve.

A high-performance ZB0 variant is also in development, with two motors and all-wheel drive. Whether BMW will designate it the iM1 remains unconfirmed, but a performance-focused compact electric hatchback on this platform would be one of the more compelling propositions in BMW’s recent history and the most direct spiritual successor to the i3’s original mission of proving that small and electric could also be genuinely fun.

The interior receives the full Neue Klasse treatment regardless of powertrain: the 17.9-inch slanted central screen and 43.3-inch Panoramic iDrive unit replace the conventional instrument cluster. Both the electric i1 and the combustion 1 Series will share this interior architecture, meaning buyers won’t be navigating a technology trade-off alongside a powertrain choice.

The Leipzig Factor

BMW’s Leipzig plant underwent a five and a half week shutdown this summer specifically to prepare for Neue Klasse production. Plant manager Petra Peterhänsel confirmed the retooling to dpa without specifying which model would follow. The process of elimination is straightforward: the i3 sedan is built in Munich, the iX3 in Debrecen, Hungary. Leipzig builds only compact models and the i1 is the compact Neue Klasse car that fits the plant’s established footprint.

Leipzig’s significance extends beyond the i1. It is BMW Group’s established compact car plant, currently building the 1 Series, 2 Series Gran Coupe, and MINI Countryman on UKL2. A Neue Klasse Leipzig is a Neue Klasse compact family hub. The production investment being made now is shared infrastructure across the entire BMW Group compact family, which has implications for what else eventually rolls off those lines.

The North American Argument

The i3 is the most important piece of context for the North American case. BMW sold the i3 here from 2014 until 2021, building a loyal owner community and demonstrating that there was genuine appetite for a small, premium, distinctively designed EV in a market that conventional wisdom said only wanted large vehicles. When BMW discontinued it, that audience didn’t disappear. It went largely unserved.

The i1 addresses that gap with hardware the i3 could never have offered. Where the i3 peaked at around 153 miles of real-world range in its final battery configuration, the i1 targets 600 km WLTP, roughly 370 miles, on Gen6 cells. Where the i3 charged at a maximum of 50 kW DC, the i1’s 800-volt architecture enables rates that are several multiples of that. And where the i3’s carbon fibre construction and unconventional proportions made it a niche proposition even within the premium EV segment, the i1’s conventional five-door hatchback body makes it immediately legible to a much broader audience.

The ZB0 performance variant is the detail most likely to move the needle in North America specifically. A rear-wheel drive, dual-motor, high-output compact electric hatchback from BMW carries a sporting credibility that neither the original i3 nor any previous small BMW has been able to claim in this market. If one variant makes the North American investment case most clearly, it is probably that one.

What It Means for BMW’s Global EV Strategy

The i1 sits at a significant inflection point in BMW’s broader electrification approach. The brand has been explicit about its resistance to committing to a fixed EV-only timeline, preferring a technology-open strategy that keeps combustion and electric options available in parallel for as long as market conditions require. The dual-platform 1 Series, electric Neue Klasse alongside combustion UKL2, is the clearest product-level expression of that philosophy yet.

What it also represents is a deliberate attempt to bring Neue Klasse’s benefits to the most accessible price point in BMW’s range. Every Neue Klasse product to date has been a premium or near-premium proposition. The i1 is where the platform reaches buyers considering the entry point of the BMW range for the first time, and getting that car right on price, range, dynamics, and the intangibles of what it feels like to drive matters for BMW’s electrification story in a way that another large SUV simply doesn’t.

For North America specifically, the i3 precedent removes the biggest uncertainty from the equation. BMW doesn’t need to guess whether there is a market for a small premium EV here. It already knows there is. The question is whether the i1’s considerably more capable and more conventional package can expand that market beyond the committed early adopters the i3 attracted, and whether BMW’s product planners have decided the answer is yes.

Nothing is confirmed. The engineering case is strong, the market logic is sound, and the production infrastructure is being built. Whether the i1 officially joins the North American lineup is a question 2027 will likely start to answer. Given what the i3 built here and what the i1 brings to the table, the case for yes has rarely been stronger.

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We’ve been tracking this car’s staggered rollout for months, from the i3 and G50 sharing a design language to the full production timeline, but this Miramas update is the first real look at how the ICE cars are shaping up dynamically, and it comes with two genuinely interesting pieces of news: a new flagship engine designation and a feature that BMW has never offered outside its M GmbH models.

The M350 xDrive Replaces the M340i

BMW’s naming here is a departure. Rather than continuing the M340i badge, the range topping ICE 3 Series arrives as the M350 xDrive, powered by a 3.0 litre TwinPower Turbo six with 48V mild hybrid assistance. BMW’s own figures put combined output at 326 kW, which the automaker quotes as 443 PS on the European metric scale, though UK reporting has put the same output at 437bhp, a reminder that the horsepower BMW leads with in press materials shifts slightly depending on which market’s conversion you’re reading. Torque lands at 580 Nm (428 lb ft). BMW quotes a 0 to 100 km/h time of 4.1 seconds and a 155 mph top speed, with production starting in the second half of 2026. For context, that sprint time sits roughly six tenths behind the current M3, which tracks with the M350 sitting a clear notch under a full M car rather than encroaching on it.

That output figure is a meaningful jump over the outgoing M340i xDrive. For comparison, we recently drove the 50 Jahre Edition M340i, which uses the same basic engine family at a lower state of tune, and called it the sweet spot of the current lineup. The M350 pushes well past that car’s output while keeping the eight speed Steptronic and standard xDrive, along with an M Sport differential and variable sport steering as standard equipment. Adaptive M suspension also comes fitted from the factory, rather than sitting on the options list.

Drift Moment Comes to a Non-M Car for the First Time

The more surprising announcement is Drift Moment, a function that sends engine drive fully to the rear axle via the central display, paired with M style multi disc clutch control and DSC switched off. BMW has offered variants of this feature on M GmbH cars before, but this marks its first appearance on a non-M badged model. It won’t be there at launch. BMW is holding it back for a software update sometime in 2027, then pushing it to already delivered cars over the air rather than gating it behind a mid cycle refresh.

Dr Mihiar Ayoubi, BMW’s Senior Vice President for Driving Experience Development, framed the new car as building on decades of dynamic credibility for the nameplate, tying the chassis hardware to what BMW calls its Driving Stack software layer. That software piece matters more than it might first appear. The G50 gets its own tuned version of the Driving Stack for combustion cars, running parallel to the Heart of Joy system found in the electric i3. Both are meant to deliver a similar driving character despite fundamentally different underpinnings, which is really the whole story of this generation of 3 Series.

What an Actual Drive Suggests

We haven’t driven the M350 xDrive ourselves, so consider this secondhand, but our friend Horatiu Boeriu from BMWBlog spent a full day in a camouflaged prototype at Miramas, across a technical handling track, a wet slalom, a high-speed circuit, and a public road loop, with BMW engineers riding along to explain the chassis work. His verdict: the spec sheet reads closer to M3 territory than any M Performance 3 Series before it, but the car settles into an easy daily driver character once left in its softer modes, with the gap to the M3 itself narrower than it’s ever been. He also got to sample DSC fully off, which BMW’s own engineers described as the closest preview available of what Drift Moment will eventually feel like, since the software isn’t finished. Worth a full read once you’re deep into this car, there’s a lot of engineering detail in there, including how BMW adapted its i3 Heart of Joy torque logic for a combustion engine’s slower actuators.

One Body, Two Very Different Cars Underneath

This is the same trick BMW pulled with the i3 and G50 sharing Neue Klasse styling despite running on entirely separate platforms, and it is worth noting that BMW’s MINI division has been doing exactly this with the F66 and J01 Coopers for two years now, wrapping a heavily revised UKL platform in styling nearly identical to its EV sibling. BMW has said combustion isn’t disappearing anytime soon, and the G50’s chassis work in Miramas is the clearest evidence yet of a company betting on visual continuity while letting the engineering underneath diverge sharply by powertrain.

That dual track thinking extends beyond the M350. The next M3 arrives in 2027, and unlike this car, it will be offered with both petrol and electric power. BMW M boss Frank van Meel has described the coming electric M3 as the combustion car’s own natural rival inside the M lineup, which puts the M350’s soft launch of Drift Moment in a slightly different light. It reads less like a one off gimmick and more like BMW testing rear biased theatre on a mainstream car before the full M3 twins arrive and have to answer the same question properly.

The new suspension hardware backs up the dynamics focus. BMW cites a longer wheelbase than the outgoing G20, wider tracks front and rear, a double joint spring strut front axle and five link rear, plus newly developed lift related dampers as standard, with adaptive and adaptive M suspension as options. Buyers can also spec staggered 245/35 R20 front and 275/30 R20 rear sport tyres for the first time on this generation.

Like the previous M340i xDrive, the catch is that xDrive-only isn’t a footnote, it’s the whole car. Yes, the added traction pays off in genuinely miserable weather, and the Drift Moment mode gives buyers a taste of rear bias without asking BMW to engineer a separate driveline. But none of that comes free. xDrive adds a transfer case, extra driveshafts and a meaningful chunk of weight over a rear-drive equivalent, weight that a car chasing sharper steering and better body control then has to spend the rest of its engineering budget fighting. It’s also a further step away from the formula that actually built the 3 Series’ reputation: a manual gearbox, a rear-biased chassis tuned around 50/50 weight distribution, and drive sent to the wheels doing the least amount of other jobs. None of that is gone entirely, the M350 still drives through the rear axle by default and the chassis work at Miramas sounds genuinely serious. But simulating oversteer through software is not the same as building a car light and rear-biased enough that oversteer was simply how it behaved.

Of course the M340i made the identical trade, xDrive standard, no manual on offer, and it sold well enough that we called it the sweet spot of the current lineup. In fact we called it that. Buyers, it turns out, mostly didn’t ask for the purist formula back. That doesn’t make the trade-off disappear, it just means BMW isn’t wrong about where the market actually sits. What they have done with the m340i and now even further with the M350 is create a car that does it all with as little trade-off as possible.

All figures are still provisional given the car remains in development testing, and WLTP fuel consumption numbers haven’t been published yet. Expect the non-US 50 xDrive to lead the rollout, with the M350 xDrive and US market cars following later in the staggered launch we outlined in our full G50 production breakdown.

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Ben Bertucci spent five years earning access to Naito Auto Engineering, a three generation restoration shop in Tokyo that has spent decades quietly working on some of the most valuable cars in the world while maintaining almost no public profile. One of One premiered on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Google Play and Vudu on 1 September 2025, and it is worth the wait, even if the film itself sometimes feels like it is still deciding how much it wants to show you.

The shop was founded by Shinichi Naito after the war, servicing cars for the American GIs stationed in Japan. His son Masao took a service station and turned it into a business coveted by collectors worldwide, one with enough standing to choose its own customers. That expansion also built Masao a personal collection that the family still keeps in their famously cramped Tokyo premises, one lift essentially sitting on the pavement outside.

The Collection On Screen

The cars in that collection are the reason most people will watch this film, and they do not disappoint. A Ferrari 250 LM sits at the emotional centre of the documentary, acquired by Masao in the 1990s and treated by Bertucci as the clearest expression of the family’s philosophy: restoration as an act of reverence rather than a route to a bigger number at auction. Alongside it are a Ferrari 275 GTB-4, a Porsche 907 K Shorttail, a Porsche 993 RSR, and a BMW 3.0 CSL, the Batmobile era racer that MotoringFile’s sister site has driven and written about at length. Keep an eye on the shop scenes too and you will spot a classic Mini or two parked among all that seven figure metal, easy to miss on a first watch. Auction house founder David Gooding appears to vouch for the family’s standing in a market where, remarkably, many collectors have simply never heard of them.

A Window into Japanese Car Culture

We were in Tokyo for the sakura season not long ago and wrote at length about what makes Japanese car culture different from anywhere else. It is not about horsepower or status, it is about taste, history and the satisfaction of driving something with a back story. We saw classic Minis parked with surgical precision in impossibly small spaces, a bookstore in Daikanyama that treats automotive history as literature, and Daikoku Futo turning into a Sunday cathedral where supercars idle next to drift builds and you can miss Lewis Hamilton in a Ferrari F40 by an hour, as we did.

Naito Auto Engineering is that same instinct taken to its logical extreme. Cars as culture, not just machines, restored with the same reverence whether the badge is Italian, German or British. Watching One of One after that trip, it plays less like the story of one unusually obsessive family and more like a very specific, very extreme version of something we watched happen on those streets all week.

Bertucci’s instinct is to observe rather than explain, and mostly that works. The opening act in particular is all texture, a cramped shop under buzzing fluorescents where perfection gets coaxed out of sheet metal by hand. But the fly on the wall approach has a cost. Threads get raised and dropped, most notably what happened to Shigeo, Masao’s brother, who was abruptly fired from the family business and then largely disappears from the film. Viewers used to the processed, numbers heavy style of most American car documentaries may find themselves wanting more provenance detail and fewer unexplained gaps. The story of the third generation, So and Kei Naito, and whether they can sustain a business that depends on two men doing work that once took a full shop, is the film’s real tension. It does not always trust the audience to sit with that tension without a tidier resolution.

The Verdict

One of One is not the exhaustive Naito history some will want, but it was never trying to be. It is a study of how legend gets made by people who would rather do the work than talk about it. Whether your interest starts with a Ferrari, a Porsche, a BMW CSL or a Mini Cooper, this is a film built for anyone who loves cars as culture and not just as machines, and it is worth the 81 minutes.

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The problem it solves is real, and it predates electrification even if EVs are what exposed it. A typical car spreads driving-dynamics functions across a dozen or more separate controllers, each with its own supplier, its own software stack, and its own decade-old assumptions about how fast a system needs to respond. That patchwork was tolerable when a combustion engine was the slowest thing in the loop. Electric motors respond in milliseconds, and BMW’s own dynamics engineers have said plainly that the old, balkanised controller network simply couldn’t keep pace with what electric propulsion is capable of. The Heart of Joy is the fix: drivetrain, steering, brakes and energy recuperation, folded onto a single controller processing information roughly ten times faster than BMW’s previous systems allowed.

That’s the part worth sitting with. This isn’t a bigger motor or a cleverer suspension setting. It’s the computing layer underneath all of it, and BMW has built the case that the computing layer is now the thing that determines whether a car feels alive or merely competent.

The iX3 is the proof point, and the reviews landing since it went into customers’ hands back that up. A recurring theme across outlets that came in sceptical is a 2.3-tonne SUV that manages to shrug off its own mass in corners, staying flat through direction changes without adaptive dampers or active anti-roll doing the work, the kind of body control usually reserved for cars several hundred kilos lighter. The brake pedal draws particular attention: because the Heart of Joy decides in real time whether to use regeneration or friction braking, testers keep noting a single, consistent pedal feel rather than the two-stage mushiness that plagues most EVs blending the two. BMW puts a number on it, claiming the system handles roughly 98 percent of everyday stops through regeneration alone. A few reviewers have flagged inconsistent ride quality on rougher pavement with larger wheel options, so the tuning clearly still varies by spec and trim, but nobody driving the finished car is calling the underlying system a gimmick anymore.

I had an early, unusually direct look at what this architecture is built to survive before any of that reached customers. Riding in the BMW Vision Driving Experience, a rolling test rig producing more than 13,000 lb-ft of torque and using ground-facing fans to physically suck itself onto the pavement, what stood out wasn’t the torque figure. It was how little drama the car made of managing it. That test mule was never meant for a showroom. Its entire purpose was to abuse the Heart of Joy at a scale no customer will ever ask for, so that the version reaching production feels, by comparison, effortless. Having felt that stress test firsthand, the composure showing up in iX3 reviews now reads less like a surprise and more like the architecture doing exactly what it was built to do.

What makes this a foundation rather than a feature is scale. The Heart of Joy is one of four superbrains underpinning the Neue Klasse electronics architecture, alongside separate units for automated driving, infotainment and core vehicle functions, and BMW has been explicit that this isn’t a one-model exercise. It’s the digital nervous system meant to underpin dozens of future BMWs, EVs, plug-in hybrids and combustion cars alike, which is why the company has called it the single largest platform investment in its history. The i3 sedan picks it up next, and BMW has already confirmed the electric M3 will lean on the same unit to manage its all-wheel-drive torque distribution and dynamics calibration. For a division whose entire identity rests on feel, handing that job to a centralised software system is a genuine departure from how M has calibrated cars for decades, and it says plenty that BMW is betting its most scrutinised nameplate on it rather than treating the Heart of Joy as an SUV-only convenience.

That’s really the shift worth understanding here. For most of the last decade, what made a BMW feel like a BMW was mechanical, chassis tuning, suspension geometry, steering weight. None of that has gone away, but the Heart of Joy is now the layer that decides how well all of it gets expressed in real time. BMW is betting that great driving cars in this next era get built from the computing architecture outward, not bolted onto it afterward. Based on what’s actually reaching customers so far, that bet is paying off.

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The headline act is the North American premiere of the BMW M Concept Neue Klasse, which already had its moment at Le Mans this year, and the Vision BMW ALPINA, which debuted at Villa d’Este. Pairing them at the same event is deliberate. One is BMW M signaling where electrified performance is headed, complete with a four-motor drive system run by the Heart of Joy “superbrain.” The other is ALPINA doing what ALPINA does best: taking a design language and quietly making it feel more expensive and more considered than anything around it. Put together, they are BMW’s answer to a question the whole industry is still fumbling: can an electric future actually feel like a BMW, or just like an appliance with a kidney grille glued on. BMW clearly thinks the answer is yes. Whether Pebble Beach crowds agree is the more interesting question.

The scheduling itself tells you how BMW wants this story to unfold.

Thursday, August 13, opens at Legends of the Autobahn with a 40th anniversary exhibition for the M3, running from the E30 original through the new 2027 BMW M3 CS Handschalter. That range is the point. The E30 M3 was a homologation special built to go racing, not to flatter anyone’s ego, and it became one of the most collectible cars BMW has ever made almost by accident. A manual, CS-badged 2027 M3 sitting next to it is BMW arguing, fairly convincingly, that the enthusiast thread hasn’t actually broken. That evening, the M Concept Neue Klasse makes its North American debut at the House of M, before it goes on to appear at both the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion and the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Three appearances in one week is a lot of stagecraft for one concept, but it also suggests BMW wants this car seen by three very different audiences: enthusiasts, collectors, and the concours crowd that ultimately shapes taste.

Friday belongs to ALPINA. The Vision BMW ALPINA gets its North American premiere at The Quail, with a press conference at 11:25 a.m. The description, a coupe roofline, shark nose, full-grain leather, crystal controls, reads like ALPINA leaning hard into its identity as the brand for people who find M too loud and standard BMW too anonymous. That’s a narrower lane than M’s, but it’s one ALPINA has owned for decades, and putting a design study at The Quail rather than a louder venue fits.

Saturday is where the anniversary stops being a static display and starts making noise. Four generations of M3 GT racers, the 1992 E30 M3 DTM through the 2011 E92 M3 GT, will run at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca, with Mike Skeen, Bill Auberlen, and Frank van Meel behind the wheel. This is the part of the week that actually matters if you care about the M3 as a racing nameplate rather than a marketing one. The E30 DTM car and the E92 GT car are separated by two decades and represent almost entirely different eras of touring car and GT racing, and seeing them on the same grid is a rare treat that says more about the M3’s competition pedigree than any anniversary plaque could.

That evening, BMW shifts gears entirely for the Kith reveal. An invitation-only panel with BMW design leadership and Kith founder Ronnie Fieg will unveil bespoke cars and preview the 2026 “Kith for BMW” collection. It’s easy to roll your eyes at another car-meets-streetwear collaboration, and the format, invitation-only panel, capsule collection, bespoke builds, follows a playbook plenty of brands have run into the ground. What’s kept the Kith partnership from feeling like a cash grab so far is that BMW has let Fieg’s team genuinely reinterpret design language rather than just slap a logo on a hoodie. Whether that holds for another year remains to be seen, but BMW clearly believes there’s more story left to tell here.

The week closes on Sunday with both concepts, the M Concept Neue Klasse and the Vision BMW ALPINA, sharing the Concept Lawn at the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. That’s the highest-visibility real estate in American car culture, and putting an M concept and an ALPINA concept there together, rather than saving the moment for just one, is BMW betting it can hold two different luxury and performance narratives at once without either one diluting the other.

What’s interesting isn’t just the volume of what BMW is doing this week, it’s what the sequencing says about where the brand thinks it’s vulnerable. The M3 anniversary program exists to remind enthusiasts that BMW hasn’t lost the plot on driver’s cars, even as the brand pushes hard into a four-motor electric future. The concept car premieres exist to convince the design and luxury crowd that electrification doesn’t have to mean beige. And Kith exists to make sure BMW stays culturally relevant to an audience that doesn’t care about Nürburgring lap times at all. On paper, it works. In practice, spreading a brand story across three different audiences in four days risks blurring the very thing that made the M3 matter in the first place: a car built with total clarity about what it was for. BMW seems aware of the tension. Whether Monterey convinces us they’ve resolved it is worth watching for.

BMW Monterey Car Week 2026 Schedule

Thursday, August 13: 40 Years of the BMW M3 exhibition at Legends of the Autobahn, Pacific Grove Golf Links, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., free admission. BMW M Concept Neue Klasse North American premiere that evening at the House of M.

Friday, August 14: Vision BMW ALPINA North American premiere at The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., press conference at 11:25 a.m.

Saturday, August 15: M3 racing heritage on track at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. “Kith for BMW” 2026 panel and reveal that evening (invitation-only).

Sunday, August 16: BMW M Concept Neue Klasse and Vision BMW ALPINA on the Concept Lawn at the 75th Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, The Lodge at Pebble Beach, 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The post BMW’s Monterey Car Week 2026: From a Kith Collab to the Next M3 and a Alpina Rebirth appeared first on BimmerFile.

The numbers, without the spin

For the first half of 2026, BMW Group delivered 1,156,727 BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce vehicles, down 4.2 percent year on year. Revenue came in at €62,266 million, off 8.0 percent. Group EBT margin for H1 landed at 6.5 percent, down from 8.5 percent a year earlier, and automotive EBIT margin for the half was 3.6 percent, well below the 6.2 percent posted in H1 2025.

The story inside those numbers is regional and stark. China deliveries fell 20.4 percent for the half and 30.2 percent in Q2 alone, a decline CEO Milan Nedeljković and CFO Walter Mertl both pointed to as the single largest driver of the miss. Europe grew 5.4 percent for the half and accelerated to 7.6 percent in Q2. The US grew 3.9 percent for the half and 11.9 percent in Q2. On paper, that reads as a wash. In practice, it means the two markets BMW built the Neue Klasse rollout around are performing exactly as hoped, while the market BMW has relied on for two decades of volume is behaving like a different business entirely.

MINI, notably, had a strong half. Deliveries rose 11.7 percent to 149,535 units, with Q2 growth of 17.1 percent, and electrified models made up 36.9 percent of the brand’s volume. In a report full of declining figures, MINI’s line stands out, and it is worth remembering that a meaningful share of that growth is riding on electric variants at a moment when BEV demand elsewhere in the portfolio is uneven.

The restructuring is not cosmetic

The headline move out of this report is the agreement BMW reached with its Works Council on a workforce restructuring program, including a voluntary severance scheme for indirect functions in Germany. Nedeljković was direct about the intent: leaner, faster decision making, and a lower cost base that starts showing up in the numbers from 2027 onward. Mertl added that the automotive EBIT margin guidance of 1 to 3 percent for the full year already carries a built in burden of up to 1.25 percentage points tied to this program.

That is an unusually candid admission. BMW is telling investors, in effect, that fixing the cost structure will make this year’s numbers look worse before they look better. It also lines up with a broader set of structural priorities Nedeljković laid out on the call: reworking the customer journey and sales model in Europe, using AI to speed up internal decision making, rethinking global sourcing toward a more local for local model, and standardising engineering to cut development time. None of that is new territory for a legacy automaker under margin pressure, but the pace being described here, with visible impact expected within a year, is faster than BMW has typically moved.

Neue Klasse as the long game

Strip out the noise from China and the restructuring headlines, and the more durable story is that Neue Klasse is doing what BMW said it would. The iX3 is tracking toward its first 100,000 order milestone, and BMW added a second shift at Plant Debrecen ahead of schedule to keep up. The i3 has drawn strong early demand in its launch edition ordering phase. The fifth generation X5, which brought Neue Klasse technology to a five drivetrain lineup, has had what Nedeljković called an extremely positive reception since its premiere.

The bigger tell is the roadmap behind those cars. BMW says it will launch 40 new and updated models by the end of next year, including Neue Klasse variants of the iX3 and a long wheelbase i3 built specifically for China at the Shenyang plant, developed with local tech partners baked in. That is the local for local strategy Nedeljković described applied directly to the market causing the most pain right now, which suggests BMW’s read on China is not retreat, it is a bet that the wrong products were on offer, not the wrong market.

Europe’s BEV growth of 37.9 percent in Q2, largely credited to the iX3 launch, supports that read, and lines up with what we covered here in July when the sales figures first came out ahead of the full financial report.

The target that matters most

Buried near the end of Nedeljković’s remarks is the number that should anchor how you read everything else in this report: BMW intends to return to its strategic EBIT margin corridor of 8 to 10 percent by the start of the next decade. That is a multi year runway, not a quick fix, and it is a tacit admission that 2026 and likely 2027 are transition years, not recovery years.

That framing matters for how the rest of this year’s coverage should land. Every Neue Klasse launch, every restructuring update, every regional sales report from here forward is a data point on whether that corridor target is realistic or aspirational. BMW has given itself cover to post weak numbers through the workforce program and R&D pullback (down 7.6 percent for the half, with capex down 30.5 percent), betting that the product pipeline and cost base reset land before the next real downturn hits. It is a coherent strategy. Whether it is the right one depends almost entirely on whether Neue Klasse scales as fast in China as it appears to be scaling in Europe.

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Let’s deal with the numbers first, because they’re real and dodging them helps no one. The G90 M5 weighs approximately 5,390 pounds, nearly 1,000 pounds more than the F90 it replaces, and the Touring adds another 140 on top of that. That’s 540 kilograms over the outgoing M5 Competition and more than 600 over the M5 CS. For scale, the original E28 M5 came in at 3,153 pounds in 1985. The F10 and F90 generations both hovered around 4,100. The G90 isn’t a continuation of that trajectory. It’s a break from it.

Power to weight tells the same story. At 299 horsepower per tonne, the G90 actually trails the F90’s figure of well over 300, despite having 100 more horsepower on paper. The Touring hits 62 mph in 3.5 seconds, a tenth slower than the old Competition. For a car with a genuine power advantage, that’s the number that gives away where the weight went.

Some of that traces to the platform. The G90 shares its architecture with the i5, a decision that bought BMW efficiency and production economies but also imported the dimensional footprint of an EV-capable chassis. At 200.6 inches long and 77.6 inches wide, mirrors excluded, the M5 Touring sits close to the three row X7 and rivals older 7 Series sedans for sheer size. None of that happened by accident, and none of it is up for debate.

The question worth asking isn’t whether the numbers are accurate. It’s whether they capture what the car is actually like to live with.

What the Data Misses

Body roll shows up when you push the G90 hard through a tight second gear corner, and heavy braking makes the mass known. Anyone claiming otherwise hasn’t driven it back to back with a CS. But BMW’s M engineers clearly spent their effort where it counts most: the 95 percent of driving that isn’t a canyon run. In Comfort mode, the M5 Touring rides like a car that has nothing left to prove, gliding over broken pavement in a way the old, stiffer M5s never managed.

The hybrid system gets blamed for a lot of that added weight, and fairly so. But in daily use it reads less like a compromise and more like a second personality. Real world electric range lands around 24 miles, enough for a genuinely silent airport run at 5am with the family and luggage aboard, no V8, no fuel burned, no drama. It’s easy to dismiss that as a footnote until you’ve lived it. Then it reframes the whole plug-in argument: not a performance bolt-on, but a different way to drive the same car depending on what the moment calls for.

The Road America trip made the practical case just as clearly. Full load in the back, three and a half hours each direction, and a tailgate that opens wider and sits lower than an X5’s. The M5 Touring isn’t pretending to have cargo room. It has 58 cubic feet with the seats down against the sedan’s 18.7, and that difference changes what kind of car it actually is.

Inside the Hybrid System

It’s worth pulling the hybrid setup apart, because “PHEV” is doing a lot of work in every headline about this car and not much explaining. The S68 is the same twin-turbo 4.4-liter V8 architecture BMW uses in the XM, and on its own it’s rated at up to 577 horsepower and 750 Nm (553 lb-ft). Bolted to the 8-speed M Steptronic transmission is an electric motor rated at 194 horsepower and 280 Nm (207 lb-ft), fed by an 18.6 kWh battery pack. Combined, the system produces the 717 horsepower and 738 lb-ft (1,000 Nm) BMW quotes, sent through xDrive all-wheel drive.

The downsides are exactly what you’d expect from bolting a battery, motor, and cooling loop onto an already complex twin-turbo V8. This is a mechanically busier car than any M5 before it, with more systems that can eventually need attention and more mass to manage. That battery pack is a meaningful chunk of the nearly 1,000-pound gain over the outgoing generation discussed above, and it’s not a small tradeoff for a car whose entire brief is going fast.

The upside is that the complexity earns its keep in ways a spec sheet doesn’t capture. Around town, the handoff between electric motor and V8 is smooth enough that you stop noticing it happens at all, just quiet acceleration that occasionally turns into 717 horsepower without any drama in the transition. BMW quotes an EPA-estimated 25 miles of electric-only range, and in a week of mixed driving that lined up with what I saw in practice, including that 5am airport run I mentioned earlier, done entirely on electric power with the V8 never waking up. For anyone doing short urban trips on a daily basis, that’s a genuinely emissions-free commute sitting inside a car that can also embarrass most things at a stoplight.

A Segment BMW Almost Walked Away From

There’s context worth remembering here. This is only the third M5 Touring BMW has ever built, after the E34 in the early 90s and the E61 in the mid 2000s, and neither of those cars was ever officially sold in the United States. This is the first time an American buyer can walk into a dealership and drive one home. That alone makes the G90 Touring worth paying attention to, independent of how it stacks up against a CS from three years ago.

And BMW isn’t alone in defending this shape. The M3 Touring, never sold stateside, has outsold BMW’s own expectations everywhere it’s offered. Audi kept developing the RS6. Mercedes never let the E63 wagon die. The high-performance wagon was supposed to be a rounding error in a market that wants crossovers. Instead it’s one of the more competitive corners of the segment.

Why Not Just Buy an X5 M

It’s the comparison nobody says out loud but everyone is thinking. An X5 M or X6 M gets you similar practicality often for comparable money. The difference is ride height. Everything about how a car turns in, loads through a corner, and telegraphs the road through the wheel changes with a taller stance. The M5 Touring sits lower than either SUV despite outweighing both by a meaningful margin, and it delivers SUV level usefulness from a stance no SUV can replicate. Drive them back to back and the distinction stops being theoretical. It’s also, for what it’s worth, a lot cooler than an SUV.

I say that as someone who dailies BMW wagons in the past and currently uses a MINI JCW Clubman as urban transportation, one of the last small performance wagons sold in America before MINI killed the model outright. Parking the Clubman next to a G90 M5 Touring is almost comedic, nearly 1,800 pounds and four and a half feet of length apart. But both cars exist for the same reason: someone inside a corporate parent kept betting that practicality and driver engagement didn’t have to be a trade-off, even after the market had mostly stopped agreeing.

The Verdict

The G90 M5 Touring is heavier than any M5 before it, and no amount of clever suspension tuning erases that under hard use. But weight alone was never going to be the whole review. This is the first M5 Touring Americans have ever been able to buy, it drives smaller than its spec sheet suggests in the conditions that make up most real ownership, and its hybrid system does actual work rather than just padding a curb weight figure.

The performance wagon was supposed to be dead. A week in the most extreme one BMW has ever built suggests the obituary ran early.

BMW M5 Touring Photo Gallery

BMW M5 Touring Full Technical Specifications

The post BMW M5 Touring Review: America’s First M5 Wagon Is as Heavy as You’ve Heard, Better Than You Think appeared first on BimmerFile.

What the pilot actually tests

This is deliberately unglamorous by design. No new engines, no new infrastructure, no new vehicle architecture. The whole premise is that decarbonisation does not have to wait for a battery only future. Existing Toyota, Lexus and BMW cars are running on fuel produced from RED compliant renewable feedstocks, dispensed from Repsol’s existing public stations, with Bosch cross referencing vehicle telemetry, station data and fuel card transactions to certify that the renewable fuel claimed at the pump is what actually ends up in the tank.

Dr Stefan Heller, heading BMW’s VEEF programme, ties this directly to the group’s long running technology openness position, one we examined at length in our breakdown of BMW’s dual platform strategy across Neue Klasse and CLAR. CLAR is built to run ICE and EV powertrains side by side well into the next decade, and pilots like this one are how BMW builds the regulatory case to keep it that way rather than being forced into an EV only product line by 2035.

The bigger policy play

Toyota’s Pascal Ruch is the most direct of the partners, stating that hitting a fully zero emission new vehicle fleet by 2035 is now genuinely in doubt, and that renewable fuels, alongside hybrids and plug in hybrids, need to help bridge that gap. Repsol’s Estíbaliz Pombo frames it as expanding consumer choice rather than replacing electrification. None of this is BMW walking back its EV investment. It is BMW hedging, again, the same instinct that has defined its product strategy since long before Neue Klasse existed, and this time with a direct line to Brussels.

Data from the pilot will be shared directly with EU policymakers over the coming months, aimed squarely at securing formal recognition for VEEF vehicles within future EU emissions frameworks. If that recognition lands, it gives combustion cars a legitimate compliance pathway that does not depend on a hard 2035 deadline, extending the runway for petrol and diesel BMWs well past what current EU rules imply. Worth flagging that this remains a Spain specific trial, with Repsol currently the only public supplier of 100% renewable petrol in that market, so scaling this beyond a 20 car fleet is a separate and much larger question than proving the concept works.

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Europe sales rose 5.4 percent for the half, and the US delivered 3.9 percent growth, with the BMW brand itself outperforming the broader American market. China and the wider Asia-Pacific region, meanwhile, fell sharply enough to pull the global total negative despite two of BMW’s three biggest markets moving in the right direction.

The real story is the Neue Klasse ramp. With the iX3 now reaching customers in Europe, BMW Group’s fully electric deliveries hit 116,807 units in Q2, up 5.2 percent, and Europe alone saw BEV growth of 38.0 percent for the quarter. Germany was a standout, with BMW climbing to second place for electric vehicle registrations in Q2. Jochen Goller said the iX3 is tracking toward its first 100,000-order milestone, and that the i3, the second Neue Klasse model, is already generating strong demand ahead of launch.BMW Group delivered around 1.15 million vehicles in the first half of 2026, a 4.2 percent decline overall. On paper that reads as a down half. Look closer and the picture is a lot more interesting, because the regions where BMW actually controls its own destiny (Europe and the US) both grew, while the drag came almost entirely from a China market that’s behaving nothing like the rest of the world right now.

Europe sales rose 5.4 percent for the half, and the US delivered 3.9 percent growth, with the BMW brand itself outperforming the broader American market. China and the wider Asia-Pacific region, meanwhile, fell sharply enough to pull the global total negative despite two of BMW’s three biggest markets moving in the right direction.

The real story is the Neue Klasse ramp. With the iX3 now reaching customers in Europe, BMW Group’s fully electric deliveries hit 116,807 units in Q2, up 5.2 percent, and Europe alone saw BEV growth of 38.0 percent for the quarter. Germany was a standout, with BMW climbing to second place for electric vehicle registrations in Q2. Jochen Goller said the iX3 is tracking toward its first 100,000-order milestone, and that the i3, the second Neue Klasse model, is already generating strong demand ahead of launch.

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The new 12Cilindri Manuale has a clutch pedal. It has a gated aluminium shifter. It has none of the mechanical connection those parts implied for a century. Underneath both is the same eight-speed dual-clutch transmission fitted to every standard 12Cilindri. Ferrari calls the system Manuale By-Wire. The pedal and lever are actuators. They send inputs to software that operates the DCT’s clutch packs to reproduce the resistance, timing, and even the stall risk of a real manual. The car is homologated as an automatic. It can be driven as one at the press of a button.

Skeptics will call this a costume, not a comeback. That reaction is fair on its face. A DCT wearing a manual’s clothing is still a DCT. But the skepticism misses what Ferrari actually solved. The company built a manual driving experience without the packaging, homologation, or emissions cost of an actual manual gearbox. That is a different engineering problem than the one manufacturers have been failing to solve for a decade, and it is the one that matters going forward.

Why the distinction matters

Every automaker that has walked away from manuals, including BMW Group, has cited the same pressures. Emissions testing under EU cycles penalises the variability of human shifting. Packaging a clutch and shift linkage into an electrified platform is expensive and space-intensive. Development budgets for a shrinking customer base rarely clear the bar internally. Ferrari’s answer sidesteps all three at once, because the transmission underneath never changes. It is the same DCT the rest of the range already uses, already certified, already packaged.

That is the part worth paying attention to, independent of the £508,000 price tag. Ferrari has just demonstrated, at production scale, that driver engagement can be decoupled from the transmission architecture required to deliver it.

This isn’t staying at Ferrari

Systems like Manuale By-Wire depend on suppliers, not just Ferrari’s own engineers. Someone builds the load-simulating clutch actuator. Someone writes the control layer that interprets pedal feel and lever position. Those suppliers do not sign exclusivity agreements with one client, and a two-year development program does not stay proprietary once it has been validated in a production car. Top Gear’s team came away from Ferrari’s own briefing with the suggestion that a 296 without its hybrid hardware could plausibly get the same treatment. Trademark filings point to a broader digital manual program at Ferrari, not a single special series. The logical next step is a supplier taking the concept to other manufacturers entirely.

That puts BMW in an interesting position.

BMW has held onto real manuals in Europe longer than most rivals, largely on M cars, largely because the brand’s identity depends on it. But even those holdouts face the same CO2 testing pressure that has eliminated manuals elsewhere in the group. MINI has already lost the fight. The Getrag GS6-59BG fitted to the outgoing F56 JCW was, by any measure, the strongest manual MINI had built, engineered with torque headroom well beyond what the engine ever produced. It did not carry over to the F66. MINI has confirmed the reason was EU emissions test methodology, not a lack of engineering will or customer demand. Over half of F56 JCW hardtops sold in the US left the factory with three pedals.

MINI USA has continued to push for a manual’s return to the F66 and F67 JCW, by MotoringFile’s reporting, and the effort as described centres on reintroducing the same physical Getrag hardware. Ferrari has just proven a different path exists. If the obstacle is a testing methodology rather than the driving experience itself, a by-wire system that is legally an automatic clears that obstacle without requiring an entirely new transmission to be engineered and certified from scratch.

The unresolved variable is cost

None of this scales to BMW or MINI money as currently built. Ferrari’s premium for the Manuale system reflects a bespoke solution wrapped into a 1,499-unit Tailor Made program, developed over two years for buyers who were never price-sensitive. Neither an M car nor a MINI Cooper JCW can absorb anything close to that structure.

The more useful question is whether a high-volume supplier, Getrag included, could industrialise the concept and bring the cost down to something viable at mainstream volumes. That is a manufacturing and software problem, not a physics one. Ferrari solved the physics. Whether the economics ever work at BMW Group’s scale is genuinely unresolved, and nobody at BMW, MINI, or Getrag has said anything on the record. But the concept no longer needs to be proven. It needs to get cheaper. That is a very different, and considerably more solvable, problem than the one the industry thought it was facing.

The post How Ferrari’s Manual Return Could Change BMW M Cars appeared first on BimmerFile.

Q1 told a different story entirely. BMW sold 84,231 vehicles, down 3.9% year over year, with electrified sales cut roughly in half as the outgoing PHEV and BEV lineup thinned ahead of the Neue Klasse rollout. That kind of start would normally set the tone for a down year.

Instead, Q2 reversed it hard. BMW sold 102,713 vehicles, up 13% from a year ago, enough to not just offset the Q1 shortfall but push the half-year total to a new high. Whatever softened demand in the first three months of the year, it didn’t last.

Winners and losers, by model

This is confirmed through Q1 only. BMW hasn’t published the Q2 model-level table yet, so the pattern below explains the first quarter, not necessarily the surge that followed it.

3 Series and X5 were both running hot ahead of their generational changeovers, up 10.2% and 7.1% respectively. Classic late-cycle behaviour, buyers moving before the platform switch.

X6 also had a strong Q1, up 23.6%, though it’s a smaller-volume model and carries less weight in the overall total.

Electrified sales were the clearest drag, cut roughly in half as the outgoing BEV and PHEV lineup thinned out ahead of Neue Klasse.

Whether the 3 Series and X5 bump carried into Q2, the quarter that actually drove the 13% surge, isn’t confirmed yet. The model-level PDF should land alongside the topline release. Once it does, this section gets rebuilt on real Q2 numbers.

Zooming out helps put the total in context. Here’s how BMW USA’s first-half sales compare across the last ten years.

The chart shows a brand that’s been broadly climbing since the pandemic trough of 2020, with 2026 now sitting above every year in the dataset. That’s notable given the backdrop: tariff pressure, a compressed EV incentive environment, and a major platform transition all landing in the same twelve months.

The Neue Klasse timeline adds real weight to the second half. The iX3, BMW’s first Neue Klasse model for the US, was named World Car of the Year and World Electric Vehicle ahead of its launch, with reservations opening in the coming months and deliveries beginning in the fall. If Q2’s momentum holds, BMW enters that launch from strength rather than trying to reverse a slump.

Worth noting for context: MINI, BMW’s sibling brand in the US, moved the opposite direction this quarter, down 2.1% as it settles from 2025’s launch surge. The divergence is a reminder these are genuinely two different stories right now, even under the same parent company and the same sales release.

None of this is mission accomplished. A record first half built on one exceptional quarter isn’t the same as sustained momentum, and Q1’s softness shows how quickly that can turn. But for a brand mid-transition to a new platform architecture, closing the half at an all-time high is the result BMW USA needed.

The post BMW USA Posts Record First Half of 2026 Despite a Rocky Start appeared first on BimmerFile.

The fifth-generation X5 debuted today at Plant Spartanburg in South Carolina, where it has been built since 1999, and where the single largest BMW production facility in the world now adds another milestone: the first battery-electric X5, the iX5, rolling off an American line. That manufacturing provenance is not incidental staging at a moment when the politics of production origin carry genuine commercial consequence.

But the more significant story here is what the 2027 X5 represents for BMW’s design and technology trajectory. This is the car where the Neue Klasse era stops being a promise and starts being a product. And in that respect, it may be the most resolved BMW we’ve seen in years.

Design: The Most Coherent X5 Yet

The fifth-generation X5 doesn’t arrive as a visual shock, and it doesn’t need to. What it does instead is something more interesting: it takes the Neue Klasse design language and applies it with a confidence and coherence that the early Neue Klasse vehicles, still finding their footing, haven’t fully achieved. The proportions are familiar, the stance is unmistakably X5, but the execution feels tighter and more intentional than anything BMW has produced in the current cycle.

The front end is taller and more upright than the G05, anchored by the vertically oriented kidney grille with Iconic Glow, a continuously illuminated surround that operates day and night and integrates into welcome and departure light animations. The double-X light icons combine low beam, daytime running, side, and turn signal functions into a single element, eliminating a separate lens module. It’s technically tidy and visually distinctive without being theatrical. The iX5 gets a continuous front apron design in place of the combustion models’ horizontal air intakes, giving the electric variant a cleaner, more monolithic expression of the same face.

The side profile is where the resolution really shows. Flush window seals, Winglet door handles integrated into the B and C pillars rather than sitting proud of the door surface, and sharper, more geometric wheel arches give the X5 a cleaner, more sculpted read than its predecessor. The roofline slopes gently to add visual agility without compromising headroom. At the rear, slim lights stretch across nearly the full width of the vehicle, echoing the double-X theme from the front. The whole car reads as carved from fewer pieces, which is exactly what Neue Klasse exterior language is supposed to achieve. On the X5, it works.

Eleven exterior colours are available, including five new to the X5: Space Silver metallic, Grey Pine metallic, Vancouver Green metallic, and, from late 2026, BMW Individual Frozen Tanzanite Blue metallic and BMW Individual Frozen Space Silver metallic. Wheels run from standard 21-inch to optional 22-inch and, for the first time on any X5, 23-inch, with ten designs available. BMW Individual paint finishes open for order in April 2027.

Optional M Sport and M Sport Professional packages add the expected visual sharpening. The M Sport Package brings Adaptive M Suspension, 21-inch M-specific wheels, M aerodynamics, and M Sport brakes with Dark Blue metallic calipers. The M Sport Professional goes further with 22-inch Trigon wheels in Jet Black, Red metallic M Sport brakes with a monochrome M logo, darker Iconic Glow M Shadowline kidney surrounds, and an M leather steering wheel with no vertical spoke and a black 12 o’clock marker.

Interior: Where Neue Klasse Makes Its Strongest Case

If the exterior is the most resolved Neue Klasse design BMW has produced, the interior is where that resolution becomes undeniable. BMW Panoramic iDrive, the display and operating architecture that defines the Neue Klasse era, arrives here in a vehicle that will reach far more buyers than the iX3 or the upcoming electric 3 Series ever will. The X5 is where this technology gets normalised, and it’s ready for that role.

BMW Panoramic Vision spans the full width of the lower windshield, projecting driving information on the left while the centre and right sections can be personalised and viewed by all passengers. Above it, the standard BMW 3D Head-Up Display projects navigation and driver assistance content directly into the driver’s line of sight, with the two systems coordinated to create a single, coherent visual layer. The 17.9-inch free-cut Central Display handles primary touch inputs, with widgets draggable between the two surfaces via drag and drop. The multifunction steering wheel follows a shy-tech philosophy, illuminating controls only when the corresponding function is available, with driver assistance controls on the left spoke and infotainment on the right. Up to seven BMW IDs store individual settings. The system feels designed as a whole rather than assembled from parts, which has not always been true of BMW interiors in the transition period.

The backlit accent strip wrapping door to door beneath the instrument panel integrates ambient lighting that adjusts colour and brightness to time of day, selected My Mode, or driver preference. It continues into the doors, visually expanding the cabin. My Modes include Sport, Efficient, Silent, Relaxed, Balanced, and Excited, with the last three also governing the welcome and departure light animations outside the car.

The materials match that ambition. Genuine slate makes its BMW debut as a decorative surface in the optional BMW Individual Clear and Bold package, applied to the centre console control panel with integrated touch controls for the parking brake, rear window defrost, and hazard lights. Crystal glass components handle the gear selector, volume controls, and seat adjustment in the same package. Standard Veganza upholstery comes in Black or Copper Brown. BMW Individual Merino Leather is available exclusively with multifunction seats, in Black, Adelaide Grey, Smoke White, Tartufo, and a new Vintage Coffee finish with a deliberately aged patina, paired with Alcantara on the instrument panel, door trims, and headliner.

Standard sports seats are heated, with additional cushioning in seat and backrest over the outgoing model, manual seat depth and head restraint adjustment, and lumbar support for the driver. The optional Luxury Seating or Climate packages add multifunction seats with ventilation, massage, electric depth and head restraint adjustment, and four-way lumbar support. Rear passengers benefit from a two-degree flatter torso angle and increased knee room, made possible in part by the 2.4-inch longer wheelbase compared to the G05.

The large panoramic glass sunroof covers approximately 28 square feet across two glass elements, with an opening front section. Climate control is 2.5-zone as standard, with slim vents integrated almost invisibly into the instrument panel. The optional Climate Package adds full four-zone control with a rear touchscreen, ventilated front seats, and heated rear seats, steering wheel, and armrests. The iX5 uses a dedicated heat pump climate system.

The optional passenger screen, a 14.6-inch full-HD display for the front passenger, streams video while moving with the interior camera monitoring for driver distraction and darkening the screen automatically. When no front passenger is present, it reverts to a reduced ambient mode matching the active My Mode. The 280-watt HiFi system with 12 speakers is standard; the optional Bowers and Wilkins system delivers up to 775 watts across up to 18 speakers with Dolby Atmos support.

Optional automatic doors, part of the Luxury Package, open and close with a light touch of the Winglet handle and can be operated from interior buttons, the My BMW App, or voice commands. Radar sensors in the side skirts, front end, and rear manage obstacle detection. Soft Close is standard across the range.

BMW Digital Key Plus uses ultra-wideband and Bluetooth to turn compatible smartphones and smartwatches into vehicle keys, with shareable digital keys assignable by role and permission through a messaging app.

The Powertrains: Five Options, One Clear Headliner

The 2027 X5 offers more drivetrain configurations than any previous BMW model, and the breadth is genuine rather than cosmetic. Each variant represents a meaningfully different proposition.

The X5 40 and 40 xDrive use an updated B58 inline-six producing 394 hp and 428 lb-ft of torque, up 19 hp and 45 lb-ft from the outgoing engine. A new turbocharger, Miller cycle combustion with shortened intake-valve opening times, optimised intake ports and combustion chambers, electric VANOS variable camshaft timing, an exhaust manifold integrated into the cylinder head, and a dual injection system combining high-pressure and low-pressure supply all contribute to both the performance and efficiency gains. Switchable exhaust-side rocker arms can interrupt gas exchange on overrun, reducing drag torque by around two thirds and recovering more braking energy through the 48V mild hybrid system. The starter generator integrated into the eight-speed Steptronic Sport transmission provides up to 17 hp of electric boost and 148 lb-ft of additional torque for sharper pull-away and acceleration response. Energy is stored in a 48V battery beneath the luggage compartment. Zero to 60 takes 5.1 seconds (4.8 with the one-foot rollout measurement), and top speed is electronically limited to 155 mph when properly equipped. The rear-wheel-drive X5 40 is also available for buyers who prefer it.

The X5 50e xDrive pairs the straight-six, producing 308 hp in this application, with a 194 hp synchronous electric motor integrated with the power electronics inside the eight-speed Steptronic, requiring no additional installation space. The fifth-generation high-voltage battery carries 26.5 kWh of usable energy. System output is 483 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque. Zero to 60 takes 4.6 seconds, top speed is limited to 155 mph, and pure electric operation is possible up to 87 mph. Estimated all-electric range is 44 miles, up roughly 15 percent from the outgoing model. AC charging is standard.

The iX5 60 xDrive is the genuinely new thing here, and the most significant BMW electric vehicle since the original i3 proved the concept was possible. Sixth-generation BMW eDrive technology arrives with 800V architecture and a cell-to-pack battery design using new 120mm cylindrical cells, 46mm in diameter, integrated directly without modules or structural intermediaries. The increased cell height raises usable energy by almost 30 percent over the 95mm cells used in the iX3. Total net usable energy is 144 kWh.

One electrically excited synchronous motor at the rear produces 325 hp and 369 lb-ft; an asynchronous motor at the front adds 245 hp and 225 lb-ft. Combined output is 570 hp and 593 lb-ft. The EESM’s magnetic field adjusts to the driving situation, reducing losses at light loads and enabling strong fields under high load, managed by a dedicated inverter. The ASM creates no drag loss when de-energised and can switch off at reduced loads to allow rear-axle-only operation for efficiency. The Energy Master, a new in-house BMW development, houses the high-voltage battery electronics and manages power supply, battery data, and thermal management from a position directly on the battery.

Zero to 60 takes an estimated 4.4 seconds, top speed is electronically limited to 130 mph, and estimated range is 435 miles based on BMW AG testing following EPA procedures. DC charging peaks at 460 kW, with 10 to 80 percent taking 22 minutes and an estimated 170 miles of range added in 10 minutes. AC charging runs at up to 15.4 kW as standard. Battery preparation automatically conditions the battery before DC charging when BMW Maps is navigating to a charging station, and can also be activated manually. Bidirectional charging covers vehicle-to-load, vehicle-to-home, and vehicle-to-vehicle applications.

A V8-powered M Performance variant follows later in 2027. The iX5 Hydrogen, BMW’s first hydrogen fuel-cell production vehicle, arrives further ahead and will pair all-electric driving with rapid refuelling.

Chassis and Dynamics: More Than Just a Platform Update

BMW has comprehensively revised the chassis for the fifth generation, and the changes go well beyond the expected incremental refinement. Increased track width, additional body stiffness, standard mixed-size tyres (255mm front, 285mm rear on standard 21-inch wheels), and new acoustically decoupled steering with a revised steering gear underpin what BMW is describing as a meaningful improvement in both precision and long-distance comfort.

Standard adaptive suspension uses electronically controlled dampers at each individual wheel, continuously adjusting across a range from comfort to dynamic. Weight distribution is close to 50:50. The optional adaptive two-axle air suspension adds automatic self-levelling, with three ride height settings: the Auto setting lowers the car by 10mm above 87 mph and a further 10mm above 124 mph or in Sport modes; High raises it 20mm for ground clearance; Low drops it 40mm when parked for easier loading and entry. The lowering function can now be selected while moving, with the car dropping automatically when it comes to a stop.

Combustion and plug-in hybrid models use tenth-generation Lateral Dynamics Management with near-actuator wheel slip limitation. The iX5 goes further with the Heart of Joy, BMW’s in-house Dynamic Performance Control system that operates up to ten times faster than previous generation hardware, adjusting drive, brakes, steering, charging, and recuperation simultaneously in milliseconds. In everyday driving with assistance active, BMW Soft Stop uses precise motor control to bring the iX5 to a standstill without jerking or brake noise, with conventional brakes reserved for enthusiastic or emergency use.

The optional Adaptive Chassis Control Professional, available on the iX5 and 50e xDrive, adds active roll stabilisation using a 48V electric motor at each axle centre, with active anti-roll bars providing fast, precise compensation of lateral forces. The system also improves straight-line comfort by decoupling the fixed connection between each axle’s wheels, allowing a softer air spring setting and reducing the lateral head movements caused by single-side surface irregularities.

Integral Active Steering is available as an option and steers the rear wheels by up to 3.2 degrees, in the opposite direction to the fronts at low speeds for a turning circle reduction of approximately 2.5 feet, and in the same direction at higher speeds for improved lane-change stability. The iX5 can also deploy rear-wheel steering to help stabilise a trailer under Enhanced Trailer Stability Control, which is new for this generation and adds a meaningful capability for buyers who tow.

Driver assistance is led by standard Driving Assistant Plus, which handles speed, distance, and lane-centring functions with speed adjustment for detected limits, corners, roundabouts, and turns. The optional Highway Assistant enables hands-free driving on suitable limited-access highways at up to 85 mph, with Active Lane Change using eye activation: a glance toward the relevant exterior mirror confirms the driver’s intent, and the car signals and changes lanes when safe. Standard active safety features include Lane Keeping Assistant, Active Blind Spot Detection, Side Collision Protection, Crossing Traffic Warning with Brake Intervention, and Emergency Brake Assistant with Evasion Assistant, which now also responds to wildlife. Exit warning can delay door opening when a cyclist is approaching.

Optional Parking Assistant Plus adds AI-supported space detection and 360-degree surround views with curb, 3D, and car wash perspectives. Manoeuvre Assistant records and repeats recurring manoeuvres up to 600 feet. The Professional version adds Remote Control Parking from up to 15 feet via the My BMW App.

The Business Case Is Obvious. The Execution Is What Earns It.

The X5 40 xDrive starts at $72,100. The rear-wheel-drive X5 40 sits below that. The 50e xDrive opens at $77,500. The iX5 60 xDrive begins at $79,800, plus a $1,450 destination charge on every variant. BMW is making margin here, as it always has, in the segment it created in 1999.

The market launch begins in October with the combustion X5 40 xDrive, with the rear-drive 40, the PHEV, and the iX5 following in Q1 2027. BMW is pacing the sequence deliberately, keeping news distributed across the model cycle rather than front-loading the launch and leaving the tail without momentum.

What the fifth-generation X5 gets right, beyond any individual feature, is coherence. The exterior, the interior, the technology stack, and the chassis all feel like they were designed toward the same idea rather than negotiated into coexistence. That hasn’t always been true of the X5, and it hasn’t always been true of BMW’s recent products more broadly. The Neue Klasse language, applied here at volume and at scale, finally feels settled.

The question that always follows the X5 is whether the driving experience still carries enough BMW character to justify the premium over an equally accomplished Audi Q7 or Mercedes GLE. The chassis revisions, Heart of Joy dynamic system, and Integral Active Steering all suggest BMW is asking that question internally. The answer arrives on the road. But on the evidence of what’s been revealed, this is the most confident X5 in a long time, and the most important BMW of 2026.

2026 BMW X5 Photo Gallery

The post Meet the 2027 BMW X5 and iX5: BMW’s Most Consequential Launch in a Decade appeared first on BimmerFile.

The codes matter more now than at any point in BMW’s history. For the first time the brand is running two fundamentally different architectures in parallel, CLAR for combustion and PHEV products, Neue Klasse for its EV future, with both carrying BMW badges and in some cases near-identical styling. Knowing which code a car carries tells you which world it lives in. That distinction will only become more consequential as the decade progresses.

This is the complete reference, from the E21 through the Neue Klasse family currently entering production. For the platform strategy behind why BMW is running two architectures simultaneously into the early 2030s, our dual-platform analysis covers the full picture.

How the Codes Work

The E prefix derives from Entwicklung, the German word for development. BMW began using it systematically in the 1960s and ran it through to approximately 2013, by which point the F series had already been running in parallel for several years. The F series brought turbocharged engines across the entire range, a dramatic proliferation of body styles, and BMW’s first serious EVs. G codes represent the current generation for most of the lineup. U codes appeared in 2022 for the UKL-platform X1 and X2. From 2025 onward, the Neue Klasse introduces N-prefix codes tied to platform architecture rather than sequential numbering.

That last shift is the one worth understanding in detail. The N prefix indicates Neue Klasse underpinnings. The second letter indicates architecture type: A for RWD-biased models (3 Series, X3 segment), B for FWD-biased smaller models (1 Series, X1 segment), D for larger RWD flagships. Performance M cars on the Neue Klasse platform replace the leading N with Z while keeping the remaining letters identical, so the ZA0 electric M3 sits on the same architecture as the NA0 i3, just with four motors instead of one or two.

The CLAR platform, which underpins the majority of current G-series cars, will continue for ICE and PHEV models well into the 2030s. These two architectures coexist, which is why G-code and N-code cars will share BMW showrooms for the better part of a decade.

E Series (1975–2013)

The E series defined BMW’s modern identity and ran for nearly four decades. The E30, E39, and E46 in particular remain the generations most consistently cited as benchmarks for driver engagement, the cars against which every subsequent 3 Series has been measured. The prefix ran across over 100 distinct codes and ended not with a hard cutover but a gradual handover to the F series from around 2010 onward.

1 Series

3 Series

The E46 deserves particular mention. It arrived at the end of an era when BMW’s engineering priorities and its commercial pressures were still largely aligned, and the result was a 3 Series that felt definitive rather than calculated. The debate over whether any subsequent generation has matched it has never fully closed.

5 Series

The E39 occupies a similar position in the 5 Series lineage to what the E46 holds for the 3: the generation that got the balance right between driver focus and executive comfort, before both series grew considerably in size and complexity.

6, 7, 8 Series and X Models

F Series (2008–2023)

The F series was the most prolific era in BMW’s history by model count. Turbocharged engines arrived across the entire range, the 4 Series emerged as a distinct family split from the 3, and BMW launched its first purpose-built EVs in the I01 i3 and I12 i8. The period also brought the UKL front-wheel-drive platform into the BMW lineup via the F48 X1 and F45 Active Tourer, a move that drew sustained criticism from traditionalists and remains the most debated platform decision in the brand’s recent history.

1 and 2 Series

3 and 4 Series

5 and 6 Series

7 Series

8 Series and M Performance

X Models

Electric (I Series)

The I01 i3 was a genuine engineering departure: purpose-built EV architecture, carbon-fibre body structure, and a character entirely its own. It never sold in the volumes BMW needed, but it established the credibility and institutional knowledge that made the Neue Klasse programme possible. The I12 i8 remains one of the most visually arresting BMWs ever produced, a car that looked like the future and largely drove like it too.

G Series (2015–present)

The G series is BMW’s current generation for most of the lineup, built on the CLAR platform. These cars will continue running in parallel with Neue Klasse products for the foreseeable future: our dual-platform strategy piece covers how BMW intends to manage both architectures simultaneously without cannibalising either.

1 and 2 Series

3 and 4 Series

The G50 and G51 are the forthcoming ICE successors to the G20 3 Series, engineered to share near-identical exterior styling with the all-electric NA0 i3. The visual convergence is deliberate: BMW wants buyers to choose their powertrain without the car announcing it. We covered the dual-track 3 Series strategy in full earlier this year.

5 Series

The G90 M5 and G99 M5 Touring represent the first M5s with standard hybrid assistance, a PHEV system delivering a combined 727 hp. Our G99 M5 Touring coverage covers what that means in practice for a car that was already the most capable M5 ever built before the electric motor joined the equation.

7 Series and Flagships

X Models

Electric (I Series)

U Series (2022–present)

U codes denote BMW’s current UKL-platform compact SUVs, shared architecture with the MINI Countryman U25. These are not Neue Klasse products: they represent the final evolution of the front-wheel-drive-capable UKL architecture before the platform is superseded by NB-series Neue Klasse replacements from 2028.

Neue Klasse: NA, NB, ZA Series (2025–)

The Neue Klasse is BMW’s most significant engineering investment since the original E-series cars defined the brand in the 1970s. EV-only, built on 800V architecture with Gen6 cylindrical-cell batteries and a completely new digital and software backbone, it represents a clean break from everything that preceded it. The iX3 (NA5) was the first production model, debuting at IAA 2025 and entering US deliveries in mid-2026.

NA Series (Premium Neue Klasse)

The NA0 i3 is worth dwelling on. It revives a nameplate that previously belonged to a car with an entirely different character, the I01 city EV, and applies it to the Neue Klasse 3 Series successor. The choice signals that BMW sees the i3 name as carrying positive EV equity worth preserving, even at the cost of some continuity confusion.

NB Series (Compact Neue Klasse)

ZA Series (Neue Klasse M)

The ZA0 electric M3 is the car that defines what Neue Klasse M means in practice. Production begins March 2027, with an estimated 800 to 900 hp from four independent electric motors with individual torque vectoring. There is no manual gearbox. A combustion successor, the G84, follows in July 2028 for buyers who want continuity. The full analysis of what this means for the M3 nameplate covers the implications in detail.

Two Architectures, One Brand

The Neue Klasse is not replacing CLAR. It is running alongside it, which means BMW’s product range will be more architecturally complex over the next decade than at any point in the brand’s history. G-code cars serve ICE and PHEV buyers. N-code cars serve the EV future. Both carry the same badge, share design language, and will in some cases be sold side by side in the same showroom.

That complexity is not a weakness in BMW’s strategy. It is a deliberate hedge against a transition timeline that remains genuinely uncertain. What it means for buyers and enthusiasts is that understanding which code a car carries has never been more consequential. The prefix tells you the platform, the platform tells you the powertrain family, and the powertrain family tells you the car’s entire engineering universe: its parts bin, its software, its charging infrastructure, and its long-term trajectory.

The E series told you a BMW was a driver’s car. The F series told you it had a turbo. The G series tells you it’s current. The N series tells you it’s the future. Knowing which one you’re looking at is where it starts.

The post Every BMW Model Code Explained: E, F, G, U, and Neue Klasse appeared first on BimmerFile.

This is not a story about a bad quarter. It is a story about a company spending enormously to fund its next generation of vehicles, absorbing pressure from its largest market, and making hard decisions about which models justify their place in the lineup. For anyone shopping BMW in the next two to three years, those decisions matter. And they extend further than which nameplates survive.

The Numbers

BMW’s automotive segment EBIT margin is now expected to land between 1% and 3%, down from prior guidance of 4% to 6%. Group profit before tax is projected to fall at a significant rate compared with the previous year, a steeper deterioration than the moderate decline BMW had previously forecast.

Analysts at Deutsche Bank and Jefferies both said the revision was far larger than anticipated, Global Banking and Finance and the market responded accordingly. BMW shares fell to their lowest level since November 2020, dragging German rivals Volkswagen and Mercedes lower.

In response, BMW said it would intensify and accelerate its ongoing cost reduction initiatives through further structural and efficiency measures, cautioning that these steps would carry a one-time negative impact on earnings in the second half of 2026, with financial benefits expected to materialize in subsequent years.

The Context: A Very Expensive Transition

The profit warning doesn’t arrive in isolation. BMW has been redirecting enormous capital toward the Neue Klasse platform, its next-generation EV architecture, for several years. The Neue Klasse ramp-up remains on track, with more than 40 new and updated models planned for introduction by 2027, and the Debrecen plant in Hungary already running a two-shift schedule ahead of schedule to meet demand for the iX3 and i3.

That investment has a cost, and it has been visible in the lineup for some time. Before this week’s announcement, BMW was already quietly retiring models that couldn’t justify a full new development cycle. The X4, 8 Series, and Z4 are all being phased out with no direct successors planned, having debuted together in 2018 and never sold in sufficient volumes to fund a replacement. The figures bear that out: between January and August 2025, BMW moved 1,916 units of the X4, 659 of the 8 Series, and 2,613 of the Z4.

Those are not numbers that justify a new platform investment, particularly when that capital is already committed to Neue Klasse.

With the Z4 and 8 Series gone, BMW is left with a single open-top model: the 4 Series Convertible. The combustion-powered X4 will not be renewed either, with BMW planning an all-electric iX4 instead. The pattern is consistent: when an ICE model reaches end of life, the replacement, if it comes at all, arrives as an EV on the new platform.

What This Means for Buyers

The immediate lineup impact is already here. Three models that occupied distinct, if commercially modest, positions in the range are gone. What the profit warning suggests is that this rationalisation is not finished.

The implications go beyond nameplates. Low-volume options that carry meaningful engineering and certification overhead face the same logic as low-volume models: they need to justify their cost. The manual transmission is the obvious example. BMW has maintained the gearbox on a handful of models, notably the M2 and M3, as a point of brand principle as much as commercial calculation. That calculation just got harder. If there were cost pressures associated with certifying and supporting a manual across a small number of variants before this week, those pressures are now larger. It would be premature to call it a death sentence. It is not premature to say the business case for keeping it got materially weaker.

BMW’s situation connects two pressures that are often treated separately: China’s demand collapse and geopolitical cost shocks. For the company, they now appear in the same earnings statement. A business operating on a 1% to 3% automotive margin has considerably less room to carry anything, model or option, that serves brand character rather than volume targets.

For buyers, that means a BMW lineup likely to become more concentrated around core segments: the 3, 5, X3, X5, and their Neue Klasse successors. The interesting periphery, the coupes, the roadsters, the large GTs, and the niche configurations that enthusiasts value most, faces a harder justification test than it did three years ago.

BMW’s half-year report is due 30 July 2026. That will be the first clear look at how deep the second-half cost program runs, and with it, a better read on which development programs remain funded. Anyone waiting on a rumored successor to the Z4, a next-generation 8 Series equivalent, or simply hoping the manual transmission survives the decade should watch that report closely.

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BMW M CEO Frank Van Meel confirmed that the combustion versions of the next M3 and M4 will use a revised Euro 7 S58 straight-six paired with nothing more than a mild integrated starter-generator for emissions compliance. No plug-in hardware. No heavy battery pack. No “in-between,” as Van Meel put it. “We’re sticking with the perfect combustion principle.”

The significance of that statement becomes clearer when you consider what BMW M has done elsewhere in the lineup. The current M5 carries a full plug-in hybrid system, with the added weight and mechanical complexity that entails. That was never the right answer for the M3, and it isn’t the answer here. As we reported in May, the next generation splits into two distinct cars: the electric ZA0 on the Neue Klasse platform and the combustion G84, due in 2028. The S58 carries forward into the G84, revised to meet Euro 7 standards under the M Ignite designation, arriving first in the current G80 and G82 later this year.

What That Means for the Car

The mild hybrid assist in question is an integrated starter-generator, the kind of system that smooths emissions at low load without altering power delivery character. It’s a fundamentally different proposition from a full or plug-in hybrid architecture. The G84 should arrive without the weight penalty that would compromise the fundamental balance the M3 has always traded on.

Output figures for the G84 haven’t been confirmed, but anything near or above 500 horsepower in base form is consistent with where the S58 programme is heading. More importantly, the powertrain philosophy stays intact.

The Manual

Insiders suggest a manual gearbox is unlikely to appear in the next generation cars. Van Meel’s comments at Le Mans stopped short of ruling it out entirely, pointing to demonstrated demand via the US-market G80 M3 CS Handschalter, but the combination of Euro 7 certification complexity and a shrinking supplier base for manual transmission components makes it a difficult proposition. Worth watching, but not worth counting on.

The Bigger Picture

Van Meel’s framing at Le Mans was deliberate: “the extremes, not the in-between.” The ZA0 electric car is being developed as a genuine vehicle dynamics exercise, and the G84 is designed to be the honest combustion M3 without hybridisation softening what it is. Two distinct products, two distinct powertrain philosophies, no compromise in either direction.

The G84 arrives in 2028. The S58 survives largely on its own terms. That’s the story.

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The Electric M Car is Here

We’ve been building toward this moment for a while. Last February, we had the chance to ride shotgun in the BMW Vision Driving Experience at the BMW Performance Center in Spartanburg, a wildly extreme quad-motor prototype that BMW built as a rolling testbed for the technology at the heart of the Neue Klasse: a centralized control system BMW calls the Heart of Joy. That car was explicitly not a production preview. But it was, unmistakably, a proof of concept for exactly what BMW has now shown in concept form at Le Mans. We also did a video from that event if you want the full sensory experience. Trust us, a professional M Motorsport works driver using 2,646 pounds of downforce and more torque than any production car has ever dreamed of is not easily forgotten.

The M Concept Neue Klasse takes what that Vision Driving Experience demonstrated in extremis and translates it into something you can actually imagine buying. The proportions are muscular without being grotesque: wide arches, a shark nose, a proper ducktail spoiler, and a trimaran-style front apron inspired by high-speed sailing multihulls. The new M Yellow headlights make an immediate visual statement and are set to become a signature of future BMW M cars, referencing both GT racing machinery and the BMW M Hybrid V8 currently competing at Le Mans this very weekend. The headlights and kidney grille merge into a single unit, something we first got a proper look at in the Neue Klasse platform reveal, taken here to its logical M extreme. Track Lights in three-dimensional form appear in the outer sections of both the front and rear aprons, framing the trimaran element above the floating diffuser at the back. The newly developed Monza Red metallic paint and red-and-blue coded center-lock wheels round out the visual connection to BMW M and its motorsport roots.

Power, Torque and Tech

Underneath, the powertrain is the BMW M eDrive system: four electric motors, one per wheel, built on the Neue Klasse’s Gen6 800-volt architecture with a battery of more than 100 kWh. BMW developed a specific optimized version of sixth-generation cylindrical cells for M use, providing especially high output both when delivering energy to the motors and during charging. The battery housing itself is structurally integrated with both the front and rear axle, which means it actively contributes to driving dynamics rather than just sitting in the floor. This is the same fundamental architecture that the Vision Driving Experience stress-tested at Spartanburg. The Heart of Joy supercomputer, which integrates drivetrain, braking, steering, and recuperation into a single system processing inputs ten times faster than current BMW systems, is the brain behind all of it. In the M Concept Neue Klasse, BMW is calling this BMW M Dynamic Performance Control, and it represents wheel-specific torque vectoring without mechanical differentials. Software does what hardware used to do, only faster and with greater precision.

As Frank van Meel, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW M GmbH, put it: “Even in the new all-electric era, we continue the M-typical tradition of transferring both technological innovations and defining design features directly from motorsport into series production.” That’s not marketing language. That’s a commitment.

Interior Rethought

The interior carries the motorsport brief through completely. Four bucket seats in Bathurst Blue and Berry Red Merino leather, red five-point harnesses, and high-quality black nubuck leather on the steering wheel, door panels, and roll bar. This is a road car that’s been honest about what it wants to be. The M-specific hexagonal backlighting on the floating dashboard, finished in black knit material, and M-coded digital displays add the kind of detail that enthusiasts will appreciate in person. Red accents on the M gear selector, shift paddles, and digital displays keep performance front and center. And for the first time in a BMW M vehicle, natural fiber composite materials appear not just structurally but in visible, finished form, in the front splitter, hood outlet, diffuser, and even in the roof graphic with M branding. BMW M has confirmed this will carry through to all future fully electric M production cars.

The staging of this reveal is deliberate and meaningful. BMW M is at Le Mans with the M Hybrid V8 fighting for an overall win for the first time since the legendary V12 LMR took the checkered flag in 1999. The guiding principle, “Born on the racetrack. Made for the streets,” has never felt more literal. The yellow headlights on this concept directly reference the M Hybrid V8’s light signature. The trimaran front apron draws from racing aerodynamics. The ducktail spoiler is a nod to M heritage stretching back through the M3 CSL and further.

What BMW is doing here is threading a needle: proving that the electric era doesn’t mean abandoning what makes an M car an M car. The Vision Driving Experience showed us the technology works. The M Concept Neue Klasse shows us what it looks like when that technology gets a body worth looking at.

A production iM3 is expected to arrive around 2027-2028. If the concept in front of us is any indication of what’s coming, the wait is going to be worth it.

Gallery

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The 2027 BMW M2 xDrive: Performance Numbers

Paired with the Active M Differential and the 8-speed M Steptronic, M xDrive drops the 0-60 time to 3.6 seconds, 0.3 quicker than the rear-drive car, and 3.3 seconds with a one-foot rollout. The 50-75 mph pull takes 3.7 seconds. Top speed is 155 mph standard, or 177 mph with the optional M Driver’s Package.

The system works as it does across the M lineup: rear-biased by default, with the front axle stepping in only when needed. M Setup includes a full 2WD mode with DSC deactivated for those who want the pure rear-drive experience on track. For everyone else, the default setup delivers noticeably better traction and a more planted feel in conditions where the rear-drive car asks considerably more of the driver.

The original F87 made its case through focus and precision, and the M2 Competition built on that with more power and a chassis that still rewarded commitment. The xDrive variant adds a third dimension to that story: genuine all-weather usability without asking you to dial back expectations. On those terms it absolutely delivers.

The 2027 BMW M2 xDrive: Weight and What It Means

The xDrive M2 weighs 3,988 lbs, roughly 150 lbs more than the rear-drive G87, and a number that would have seemed remarkable for BMW’s smallest M car not long ago. Weight has been a recurring conversation across every M2 generation, and the xDrive variant is the furthest point yet on that trajectory. The performance figures don’t lie, but neither does the curb weight. This is a car that is quick because it is powerful, and the xDrive hardware justifies the mass with real capability gains. Whether that’s the trade you want to make is a different question.

The manual is not available here, which alongside the weight is the other thing worth saying clearly. The M2 CS confirmed for 2026 is also automatic-only, which means the G87 generation is closing without a three-pedal option at either end of the lineup. The manual M2 has been one of BMW’s most satisfying driver’s cars in recent years, and this is almost certainly the last generation to offer one in any form. The xDrive variant isn’t responsible for that, but it does represent where the emphasis is shifting.

The 2027 BMW M2 xDrive: The Details

BMW Individual Borusan Turkish Blue makes its M2 debut here, the first time the finish has been offered on any M2. The full exterior palette extends to five metallic and three solid options, plus six BMW Individual choices. Carbon fiber roof, M-specific interior trim, and the full range of M Performance accessories carry over from the standard G87.

Production begins in August 2026 at BMW Group Plant San Luis Potosí in Mexico. The M2 was BMW M GmbH’s best-selling high-performance model in 2025, and the xDrive variant broadens that appeal into markets and climates where the rear-drive car has always been a harder sell.

So Who Is It For?

The xDrive M2 doesn’t replace anything. The rear-drive car, with the manual option that has defined this model since the F87 first appeared in 2016, remains available. What the xDrive variant does is open the M2 to a buyer who has always wanted one but couldn’t justify it given where they live or how they drive.

For those who want the ultimate straight-line M2 with all-weather capability and no seasonal asterisks, this is unambiguously the one. For those who buy an M2 because of what it asks of the driver, the rear-drive manual car still makes the better argument. The fact that both exist is, on balance, a good thing.

2027 BMW M2 with M xDrive: Specifications

2027 BMW M2 with M xDrive: Photo Gallery

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