Electric car or performance car first? BMW's i4 battles its M-powered relative as well as the EV class favourite: the Tesla Model 3...
How can it compare to Munich’s own M4?Scudding through a fast, fourth-gear right-hander , I find myself eyeball-to-eyeball with a great blue-grey smokescreen at least as wide as the circuit itself. In a heartbeat the extent of my forward visibility drops to the end of the i4 M50’s bluff nose.
By its own admission M doesn’t yet have all the answers. It also doesn’t have much time in which to find them. The first M-badged EV will be with us around the middle of the decade. By 2030 you’ll no longer be able to buy an M car with a combustion engine.
That the i4 M50 is no trackday weapon will come as news to no one – your eyes tell you as much long before you drive it. There’s simply too much to the i4 . And while the Competition looks every bit the road-legal GT3 racer, body hung low between big, saucily-cambered wheels, the i4 M50 features no such expressions of dynamic ambition.
On the road, the electric BMW is magnificent. On track, even as it does a great impression of a 2.2-tonne fish out of water, the i4 M50 shows some class. There’s the sense of finely judged suspension working in harmony with an ultra-rigid structure , of accurate if not particularly quick or tactile steering, and of deftly calibrated controls . And on the road it all comes together in a car of quite surreal pace and composure.
Turn the wheel and you feel everything, like the front axle is somehow in your hands. And from there the poise and delicacy of the chassis, not to mention the crisp, almost lag-free responses of the engine, mean a world of deft adjustability opens up before you.
But for all the M4’s myriad strengths, its greatest achievement is the confidence it’s able to instil in you, the driver. So tactile is it as a driving tool, and so accessible does it make 503bhp, that you’re soon into a virtuous circle of giving more to get more, the car rewarding your efforts with a bigger smile and higher high every time you drive it. As M’s development boss Dirk Hacker puts it: ‘It is very important that a normal customer is able to go nearly as fast as our experts.
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