Back in the pre-pandemic days of 2019, BMW announced its intention to build a new plug-in-hybrid supercar with a focus on being fun to drive, loosely visually inspired by the original M car, the M1. That concept, dubbed the BMW Vision M Next, promised 600 horsepower and looked to pick up where the carbon-tub BMW i8 left off, but with a bit more of everything. Unfortunately, as recently reported by BMWBlog and Motor1, the Bavarian Motoren Werke is not actually going to build that car after all. A team allegedly worked on the project for a couple of years following the concept’s unveiling, but it was canned in favor of the XM plug-in-hybrid performance SUV. Sorry, too busy!
“We don’t want to lose focus on our high-performance cars because we do a super sports car. I must be honest; we are always dreaming about it. And maybe some day we find the right window of opportunity where we have the capacity to work on a car like that,” BMW M boss Frank van Meel told BMW Blog during a panel at the recent Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este.
Between figuring out the ever-changing import tariffs situation in the U.S., fighting off China’s assault on the European automobile market, figuring out electrification, and launching a new lineup of M cars, BMW is just too busy.
What’s more important than a supercar?
With the idea of a next-generation supercar fizzling out before it even really took off, what would you want to see from BMW instead? The company has a lot of irons in the fire, getting ready to launch a Neue Klasse architecture to underpin electric and gasoline versions of its popular sedans probably the biggest iron. BMW M, likewise, is trying to figure out what it’s going to do with performance versions of the Neue Klasse cars, which will likely support both electric and hybrid iterations of the iconic M3. It’s difficult to say if BMW was right to shelve the supercar project, but hopefully those engineers will turn their efforts toward making the M3/M4 actually fun to drive again.