Bernd Körber, BMW‘s head of product, is the kind of executive who treats language like a scalpel. Asked at the launch of the new i3 whether an electric sports car might be in the brand’s future, he said the idea “isn’t unlikely”, but won’t happen anytime soon.
The Neue Klasse platform underpinning the new i3 is an 800-volt architecture capable of handling up to 1,341 horsepower in a four-motor configuration. It’s the technical backbone designed for high-volume production models, but geometrically compatible with something far more extreme, as the BMW Vision Driving Experience concept made disturbingly clear.
The upcoming electric M3 and M4 will push past 800 HP, which sounds impressive until you remember they still have rear seats and a trunk. Serious numbers. Not exactly what comes to mind when someone says the word “supercar.”
According to credible industry sources, BMW came surprisingly close to greenlighting a fully electric hypercar: over 1,000 HP, a price tag in the hundreds of thousands, and a project advanced enough to be real. Then someone pulled the handbrake. The hypercar market was cooling off, and a voice from somewhere up the org chart raised the concern that a car like that might not send quite the right message for the brand. BMW, naturally, confirms nothing. But the fact that the project got that far says everything about how seriously Munich took the idea.
Meanwhile, Audi and Porsche are pressing ahead with their own high-performance electric coupé programs, navigating a market that has shed much of its earlier EV enthusiasm. What once looked like an inevitable destination is starting to look more like an open equation.
BMW has the platform. It has the horsepower. It apparently even has the blueprints. What it doesn’t have is the nerve to sign off. And Körber, with his precisely calibrated non-answer, communicated exactly that.
