Electric BMW M3: Why It Won’t Chase 1,000 Horsepower

In an era where four-digit horsepower figures have become almost routine marketing fodder for electric performance cars, BMW M is making a deliberate choice to sit this one out. Speaking with Bimmertoday at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, Frank van Meel, CEO of BMW M GmbH, said that the upcoming electric M3 will not be chasing the kind of absurd power numbers that have come to define the EV performance segment.

No Interest in the Numbers Game

Van Meel was direct about it: the electric car landscape is now full of vehicles boasting “more or less absurd” power figures, some breaking into four-digit territory. The M3 won’t be joining them — not because BMW M can’t get there, but because it doesn’t see the point.

His reasoning comes down to physics as much as philosophy. Van Meel compared the situation to a kickboxer: you need strong arms and strong legs, but that doesn’t mean you jump off both feet and try to throw a punch and a kick simultaneously — it simply doesn’t work that way in practice. Raw installed power, in other words, is not the same thing as usable, controllable performance.

He also pointed out the obvious but often overlooked truth that generating huge power isn’t the hard part in an EV — “every freight train has more power than a car” — plentiful power is cheap to produce electrically. What’s actually difficult, and what M is prioritizing instead, is control, consistency, and driver confidence.

The Real Bottleneck: Heat, Not Power

The bigger technical constraint, according to van Meel, isn’t how much power you can generate — it’s how much heat you can get rid of. Push over a megawatt into a car and you might get a handful of strong acceleration runs before temperatures spiral out of control. Once that happens, performance falls apart, because no car can carry enough cooling hardware to sustain that kind of output indefinitely.

That’s a critical distinction for anyone expecting track-day durability from a future electric M3: peak power figures on a spec sheet mean very little if the car can only produce them for a few seconds before thermal throttling kicks in. Van Meel was blunt about the scenario he wants to avoid — hitting big numbers on paper while the car quite literally cooks itself after half a lap.

BMW M’s stated goal is for the electric M3 to behave the way M customers actually use their cars: drive to the track, run session after session, and still get consistent, trustworthy performance — not a car that self-destructs thermally after one aggressive outing.

Of course, there is still an open question regarding potential CS or CSL models of the ZA0 M3 electric. We’re hearing that the “base” M3 EV will output somewhere around 900 horsepower, so it’s pretty obvious that any other future M3 variants could pass the 1,000 hp mark.

BMW’s combustion-era M3 CS and CSL models have historically pushed power, weight reduction, and track capability well beyond the standard car, and it’s reasonable to assume a similar hierarchy could eventually apply to the electric side of the lineup.

Sound and Feel: Engineering an Emotional Connection, Not a Copy

Power and heat management are only half the story. The other half — arguably the harder engineering problem — is making sure the electric M3 still feels like an M car from behind the wheel, not just a fast appliance. His starting point is that sound has always been part of the car, but he pushes back on the common assumption that the answer is simply piping in a recorded six-cylinder or V8 note — or even the V10 sound once used in the M5. That approach, he argues, doesn’t actually work: transplant a six-cylinder soundtrack into a car built around a V8, like the E92 M3, and it clashes immediately, because the sound was never designed for that car’s character in the first place.

The goal for the electric M3, then, isn’t imitation — it’s authenticity to the specific car. BMW’s engineers, many of whom have spent years developing internal combustion soundtracks, describe it as being fundamentally about the relationship between driver and car: the sound has to feel natural and has to match what the car is actually doing, even though the underlying hardware is now an electric motor rather than a combustion engine.

Why “Stepped” Feels Better Than Smooth

There’s a second, related problem: even if the sound is right, an EV’s power delivery is inherently different from a combustion car’s. Van Meel notes that simply running through the entire “sound organ” from 0 to top speed doesn’t help a driver actually judge how fast they’re going. What’s needed is a sense of discrete stages — something closer to gear changes — rather than one uninterrupted wall of acceleration.

At the same time, he’s careful to draw a line: the goal isn’t to fake a traditional automatic gearbox, because that would mean reproducing its downsides too — torque interruptions and power delivery curves that an electric motor simply doesn’t have. So the challenge becomes preserving the *benefits* of a smooth-revving electric motor while still giving the driver a stepped, gear-shift-like sense of progression.

Van Meel illustrated why that matters with a specific example: the Nürburgring’s Fuchsröhre section, where a driver brakes, downshifts, turns in, brakes again, downshifts again, and repeats through a sequence of corners. Without any sense of “steps,” he said, a driver ends up just generically braking and turning without a real feel for where they are in the car’s performance envelope — and that disconnect is exactly what BMW wants to avoid in the electric M3.

The Nürburgring Comparison Lap

To make the point concrete, van Meel described driving the current G80 M3 all day at the Nürburgring — with racing driver Claudia Hürtgen coaching him to steadily higher speeds — before switching into a prototype of the next-generation electric M3.

The result, in his telling, was that the prototype felt essentially the same to drive as the current M4 CSL, which Hürtgen was piloting alongside him: there was slightly more body movement in the prototype, but the sense of lightness, controllability, and predictability was comparable. It was only afterward that Hürtgen told him he’d actually been lapping around 20 km/h faster the entire time in the prototype — a gap van Meel says he genuinely hadn’t noticed from the driver’s seat, because the car never stopped feeling manageable and connected.

For van Meel, that’s the real proof point: not a bigger number on a spec sheet, but a car that lets a driver operate meaningfully faster without feeling like they’ve left their comfort zone. As he put it, that gap simply shows the car has moved into a different region of dynamic capability — one BMW isn’t ready to fully reveal in terms of lap times just yet, but one that, by his account, doesn’t come at the cost of the feel M drivers expect.

Still Called M3 — Van Meel Confirms It Again

One question has followed BMW M around every time the electrified M3 comes up: will it actually keep the M3 name, or will BMW reach for something like “iM3” to signal the shift to electric power? Van Meel shut that down at Goodwood just as firmly as he did when we spoke with him last month at Le Mans — the car will simply be called M3.

He seemed almost amused that the question keeps coming up. His point is a simple one: an M3 has always just been called M3, regardless of what’s under the hood. Four-cylinder, six-cylinder, V8, or all-wheel-drive xDrive variants have all worn the same badge without a prefix or suffix marking the drivetrain change. In his view, going electric doesn’t warrant an exception to that pattern.

Here’s the full video interview in German: