Another month and yet another article on a BMW supercar. Ever since the M1 came to life in 1978, the BMW community has been craving for another supercar to keep up with the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini or McLaren. Over the years, there have been many supercar projects conceptually put together in Munich, but none of them survived the BMW board’s review.
According to many of our sources, the sketches and even full sized concepts were constantly put forward for review, and some of them were quite spectacular. Unfortunately, due to many budget limitations and investments in electro-mobility, the BMW supercar never came to life.
Of course, with the arrival of a new BMW M CEO, the topic of the BMW supercar has returned. Markus Flasch is now in charge of the M Division, a young executives who aims to take the sportscar division into unchartered territories. Technology like electric cars and autonomous driving is what keep M engineers up at night, and for many of them, these could be the biggest challenges of their professional life.
So naturally, when UK outlet Car Magazine sat down with Flasch for an interview, the unicorn came up.
“There are no supercars that we’re working on right now,” Flasch says. “But the idea of a supercar is something of course that sticks in the mind of any BMW engineer, especially M engineers. We are constantly reviewing it. Not working on such a project, but reviewing. I wouldn’t rule it out.”
The question now is whether the recently unveiled Vision M Next could lead the way for a true M supercar. We learned that the Vision M Next will indeed head for production in early 2023, but it’s unclear whether it will be an i8 replacement or simply a new model engineered by M.
We’re also not certain if an M supercar would be using a plug-in hybrid technology or a fully electric drivetrain as many of the modern hypercars. Regardless of the drivetrain choice, if BMW decides to do a proper supercar, it will aim to have the M DNA embedded within, so that should translate into fun driving dynamics.
