A secretive tech group inside BMW has built an all-wheel-drive, 700-hp Tesla P85D killer, but it’s so far off the books that it’s not even considered to be an official prototype yet.
We’ve just been for a ride in the 5-series GT Power eDrive, which is what BMW’s marketing people call the combination of the company’s next-generation battery tech, two electric motors, and a front-mounted four-cylinder, turbocharged gasoline motor. It has been built to prove the optimistic musings from a handful of engineers, who are convinced there’s a fillable hole between now-conventional plug-in hybrids and battery-electric cars. And they call it The Thing.
The Thing is a scalable model for BMW’s future zero- and low-emission cars, with the powertrain’s output ultimately able to be turned down to as low as 250 horsepower and all the way up to 650 horsepower. The idea is that it would run as a pure EV for at least two-thirds of the time.
“It’s designed to have the same feeling of performance as a 550i or a 650i, running mostly electric but with a range of more than 600 kilometers [373 miles],” BMW development engineer Friedrich Wilhelm told us. BMW is still exceptionally coy about quoting anything concrete about The Thing, but by our extremely unofficial estimates, the sprint to 60 mph feels like it’s executed in the low-four-second range.
The all-wheel-drive Thing combines a 270-hp electric motor at the rear wheels, a new-generation 200-hp electric motor at the front wheels, a battery with twice the storage capacity of BMW’s current plug-in hybrids (while maintaining the same physical size), and a 230-hp turbo four-cylinder that chimes in when it’s needed. Which isn’t often. In pure electric mode, it’s rated for 470 horsepower and can spin all four wheels at will from a standing start. Who says EVs are boring?
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In fact, The Thing has so much power, acceleration, and ultimate speed that you might consider it an entry-level ticket into the 918/LaFerrari/P1 hybrid supercar club, albeit with more practicality. But we’d gladly dump some of the livability if it meant this promising powertrain gets installed in something more glamorous than the homely 5er GT. Fingers crossed.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1yzlCq8
via Agya
