Article Summary
- BMW product chief Bernd Körber says an electric sports car is “not unlikely” but won’t arrive imminently, as the brand keeps its options open amid cooling EV demand.
- The Neue Klasse platform already supports up to 1,341 horsepower in a four-motor setup, and BMW built a coupe concept on it in 2024 that hasn’t been fully ruled out.
- An unconfirmed internal proposal for a 1,200-plus-horsepower BMW electric supercar reportedly came close to approval before being scrapped over market conditions and brand concerns.
When Bernd Körber, BMW’s product chief, spoke at the i3 launch, he left a door open. An electric sports car within BMW’s lineup is “not unlikely,” he said — just not something arriving any time soon. That’s a carefully worded non-answer, but coming from someone in his seat, it’s more than nothing.
“EV has a space in sports cars also, yes,” Körber told the media during a roundtable. “So I would say not unlikely, but not something that will be imminently launched next year.” Now of course, the sports car segment definition is quite wide, from two door mid-size “series production” coupes to high-end hypercars.
The timing matters. Audi and Porsche both have battery-powered coupes in the works, and both are dealing with a market that’s lost some of its EV enthusiasm. What once felt like an inevitable segment is starting to feel like a calculated gamble. BMW’s position, at least publicly, is that the door stays open.
Neue Klasse Can Do A Lot. If Needed
It helps that the foundation is already there. The Neue Klasse platform under the new i3 runs an 800-volt architecture that can support up to 1,341 horsepower in a four-motor setup. Or even higher if you do something crazy like the BMW Vision Driving Experience. That’s hypercar territory sitting underneath what’s essentially BMW’s mass-market EV architecture.
The electric M3 is a separate thing. It’s coming, likely with an M4 EV alongside it, probably more than 800 horsepower — a serious car by any measure. But it’s a four-door sport sedan with back seats, and that’s not what people mean when they say supercar car in the original sense of the word. BMW knows the difference.
BMW Did Build A Hypercar. So The Story Goes.
Here’s an interesting footnote, though entirely unconfirmed and likely to stay that way: at some point, a proposal for a full BMW electric supercar apparently got surprisingly close to approval internally. The car was in fact built, from what we heard through the grapevine. Over 1000+ horsepower, priced deep into the hundreds of thousands.
It got shelved — the hypercar market was cooling, and there were concerns about whether a car at that level sent the right message about what BMW actually stands for. BMW won’t confirm any of this, but it does suggest the company has been sitting with these questions more seriously than anyone’s let on.
Whether they revisit that hypercar or start from scratch, the platform can handle whatever they decide to build. Right now it’s a timing question, and nobody seems to have a clean answer to that yet — including BMW.
