2022 — a.k.a. next year — marks the 50th anniversary of BMW’s M performance division, and it seems the M folks have something wild in mind. According to a new report from Great Britain’s CAR, the M division will celebrate the milestone with its first electric performance car: the iM2. It will be a halo version of the upcoming G42 2 Series….and the specs sound absolutely bananas.
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The report says BMW has been developing the project under the codename Project Katharina. The vehicle — again, based on BMW’s subcompact 2 Series — would get a quad-motor system employing BMW’s “most extreme battery technology conceived to date.” It would put out a megawatt of power — which, in America specs, translates to around 1,341 horsepower. That would be a little more than twice the power output of BMW’s current most powerful car, the M5 CS.
The iM2 will allegedly accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in somewhere between 2.0 and 2.5 seconds. The Project Katharina prototype, per the report, has already lapped the Nürbugring’s Nordschleife with a time under seven minutes — a feat only achieved to date by supercars. (To put that in perspective, it beat the BMW M8 Competition around the track by a full 40 seconds.)
CAR says the iM2 should arrive for 2022, though it hedges that the car has not received final approval. Production would be a limited run of cars in stripped-down racing spec, with carbon fiber panels, a rear seat delete and thin-walled glass, among other features. No word on pricing, but since the last generation M2 CS started at $83,000, we can expect it would be expensive.
Here’s hoping it does arrive. If BMW does launch the iM2 next year, it would be hard to conceive a stronger statement that electric power does not mean the end of BMW performance.