No stand-alone M car

Mercedes-AMG’s sports car successes won’t tempt arch-rival, BMW's M division, into building its own a stand-alone coupe or supercar, ruling out the widely rumoured M8.

BMW Group Director of Sales and Marketing, Dr Ian Robertson, told motoring.com.au that M was busy enough upgrading BMW production cars and developing its M Performance sub-brand.

Its German arch-rivals both launched their second-generation stand-alone sports cars over the last two years, with AMG delivering the short, sharp GT and GT S coupe and Audi Sport (nee quattro GmbH) bringing its second R8 and R8 Spyder to market.

Yet BMW’s M has stood pat, without a stand-alone model since the 1981 M1 -- a name also used for a M1 Homage design study in 2008 (pictured) -- and led still by the overweight M5, the overwrought M6, an M3/M4 pairing that is perilously close to GT territory and a host of hotted up SUVs.

The real driver’s flagship in the entire range is acknowledged as the M2, the first car fully developed under the reign of M boss, Franciscus van Meel.

BMW does have a swoopy coupe to rival Porsche’s 911, but it chose to deliver that car as a flagship for its eco-friendly i brand, with a carbon-fibre architecture and a plug-in hybrid powertrain featuring a three-cylinder petrol motor.

“We have no plan at the moment for a stand alone M car, like Audi or AMG,” Dr Robertson insisted.

“M is simply too busy. If you look at M and the work it has done, a lot of the development has been with M Performance, and it’s the same with i and the plug-in hybrids over pure electric vehicles.

“You ask me why there is such a gap between the i3 and i8 and the next stand-alone i car [the i-NEXT in 2021]. The i brand has been busy electrifying the rest of BMW’s models.”

M’s non-core work has seen a triple-turbo in-line six-cylinder diesel and now a four-compressor V8 diesel, along with a range of machines to bridge the performance gap between conventional BMW cars and the go-fast M cars.

AMG morphed the McLaren collaboration that delivered the underwhelming SLR into its own in-house SLS and then the GT. Pointedly, the AMG boss who drove the SLS development was Ola Källenius and his chief engineer was Tobias Moers.

Källenius is now Daimler’s board member for development, while Mueller is the chairman of AMG.

Over in Neckarsulm, Audi leaned on its Lamborghini ownership to share one architecture between the R8 and the Gallardo (and, in the second generation, the Huracan). It will also deliver a cheaper R8 in 2017 or 2018, complete with a Porsche-developed turbocharged 2.9-litre V6.

While all of this is going on, M is simply doing what it has always done – turn production BMW sedans and coupes into production M sports sedans and sports coupes or GTs.

It could have gone another way, Dr Robertson said, but the board decided the stand-alone coupe was better served delivering a halo car for electrified mobility rather than another fast petrol-powered coupe.

“I was clear with my mind that if we were bringing in an i8, we should not have another one based on it or competing with it from M,” he insisted.

“The i8 is a completely new interpretation of sports cars. We should never confuse that.”