Seeing into the future is a truly rare gift. Especially when it’s about how one of your favorite brands plans to develop and expand their performance car lineup. Catching up with Sylvia Neubauer—Vice President Customer, Brand, and Sales at BMW M—we learned that the G81 Touring isn’t coming to America. But it wasn’t all bad news. Thankfully, there’s still a lot to be excited about at BMW M.
The State of the Manual
“It’s a lifestyle statement,” Ms. Neubauer starts when asked about the US manual take rate. “It’s not, ‘oh yeah, I got the cheaper car, and it’s a manual,’ it’s a statement…like a bragging thing.” She agreed with us when we said the US market had the higher take rate on manuals, but didn’t have exact figures to provide. But not everything will get a manual: “it depends on the concept. The manual transmission is not the proper solution for every segment.” And, don’t get it twisted—the lion’s share of M cars are still automatic.
That’s not to say BMW is breaking up with the manual. Quite the opposite, in fact: “there’s nothing ever closed forever,” Neubauer says when asked if BMW is closing the door on manuals. You probably already knew, but it’s always good to hear that BMW is committed to keeping the manual gearbox alive.
Supercar, or Something Else?
Big news is brewing at BMW: “there is something on the horizon that I am probably not allowed to talk about,” Sylvia says when asked about what kind of innovation we can expect from BMW M going forward. “Introducing a new concept to a market always comes with a bit of a risk. There’s one very concrete project on the horizon that we are currently working on. I think it might be very appealing to many markets in the world.”
Not much to go on, but maybe it has something to do with that crazy electric BMW prototype spotted a few months ago. One thing it won’t be is a follow-up to the awesome M8. Sadly, that car left production earlier this year. Sylvia confirmed that the M8 “has no direct successor.”
M2 Will Be More Customizable—and Maybe Ship Quicker
“We know that there is a demand,” Sylvia says when asked about an expanded or Individual color palette for the smallest M car today, the M2. “San Luis Potosi is limited to a certain number of colors…and yes, there is assessment going on to open it up for more Individual colors.” Sadly, she stops a few words short of confirming it, but at least know that they’re looking into it. BMW M is also optimizing the larger Individual ordering process with the executive board of BMW Group, which might lead to more/quicker options.
Sylvia surprised us with a shocking statistic: the best selling M car in 2024 was apparently the M2. After that, it goes, fairly predictably, M3 and then M4. “The M3 just offers you everything,” she says. The “extroverts” picking the “less functional car that is the M4 are a smaller target group than the M3.”
M5 Production Surprises
Almost universally, the new M5 surprised journalists as they climbed behind the wheel for the first time. And turns out, it had some surprises in store for BMW M, too. “Originally, our plan was to have two-thirds of the production over the entire [M5] lifecycle as a sedan and one-third as a Touring,” Sylvia starts. “We now see that there’s more demand for the sedan, so we’ve increased production there. But there’s even more demand for the Touring. So the increase on the Touring is much higher.” She claims production is split evenly at 50:50 at the moment.
