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BMW confirms X4 for next year, i3 preorders starting to add up

BMW has confirmed the long-anticipated X4 will bow next year. Norbert Reithofer, chairman of the automaker's board of management, made mention of the upcoming CUV during remarks at the company's annual accounts press conference. Reithofer said that BMW has sold more than 2.7 million X models since it began producing the machines, and that the company plans to expand those offerings with the new X4 next year. He declined to offer up any more details, though from what we've heard so far, the model will be more of a crossover than either the X3 or the X5.
Reithofer also made it clear that BMW is getting serious about electric vehicles, saying the i3 (pictured above, in prototype form) is "definitely coming to market" and that the runabout will be ready by late 2013. BMW reports it has had "Several hundred advance orders" for the EV. As you may recall, the i3 uses a special carbon fiber reinforced plastic passenger cell to save weight and boasts a standard range of 93 miles. You can read the full transcripts from the press conference below for more information.

New BBC Top Gear season is off to a great start

The past few years have been very demanding for Top Gear fans. The Jeremy Clarkson Top Gear got too big for itself, and the core quality of the series degraded as stunts and jokes gradually became more and more stale. Things came to a head with the Fracasgate, with Clarkson punching a producer in a very nice hotel in Yorkshire with a very nice brass plaque commemorating "The End of Clarkson's BBC Career". Fast forward to a year ago, when the BBC produced a new series of Top Gear, with famed breakfast show person and shouting enthusiast Chris Evans hosting. Laden with personnel and curiously lacking any direction, the first new season collapsed onto itself with Evans eventually quitting the entire shindig. After that, viewers received a new, Amazon-produced Clarkson-Hammond-May series called The Grand Tour, which was often brilliant and just as often hampered by writing as hackneyed as the last Clarkson years of Top Gear. Now the slate is clean. Evans is gone. The first Grand Tour season has aired. The BBC has had a good long time to re-evaluate its strategy. And the first episode of this season's Top Gear has aired in the UK - and will air March 12 on BBC America. Your first extended look at all new #TopGear, coming 5 March. See you there pic.twitter.com/lYoYOtrWxR — Top Gear (@BBC_TopGear) February 23, 2017 What an improvement! It seems like the producers have taken an ax to everything not strictly necessary for making a great car show, and they've left what is absolutely crucial. There are the three car guys, Matt LeBlanc, Chris Harris and Rory Reid. There is a new studio. There is a new track car. There is a celebrity, but it's not painful to watch. There are easy jokes, there are car jokes, there are Ronin jokes. Ronin jokes! It's as if Harris, by dissecting continuity errors in the 1998 film's BMW chase, is reaching out to us fans, saying he's one of us, and he did notice the wrong wheels when the black BMW falls from the bridge. (Other mistakes are wrong-colored tach needles, for instance.) The first car film is a quality Ferrari FXX K piece, with Harris enjoying one of the 40 built track-day specials on the bankings of Daytona. It's remarkable it was Harris who was allowed to drive the exclusive Ferrari, as the first "outsider" (in his words) to drive one; years ago Harris was one of the most vocal critics of Ferrari's practices, resulting in him getting banned from driving press Ferraris. But then again, this is a customer car.

BMW reminds us what made the original M3 so great

Just because many are slavering for the global debut of the 2016 BMW M2 at the Detroit Motor Show doesn't mean BMW will let us forget the coupe that gave the letter "M" its global moxie: the M3. The Roundel has posted the first in a five-part series devoted to that seminal M, the 1987-1991 E30. Built as a homologation requirement for the race car BMW needed to beat Mercedes 190E 2.3/16V in the German Touring Car Championship, it was 1.5 times more expensive than the 325i of the time and company sales heads had doubts about being able to sell all 5,000 of them. As we know, that story had a happy ending. The first models came with a 2.3-liter four-cylinder with 195 horsepower, a chopped and tuned combination of the four-cylinder M10 block first used in 1962 and in Formula 1, with a cylinder head from the six-cylinder M88 that did duty in the M1. By the time the M3 Sport Evolution models marked the end of the first-gen production run, displacement had risen to 2.5 literz and output to 238 hp, but more important than those numbers were the phenomenal handling and relentless race victories. You should definitely check out the video above for BMW's peek into the backstory of the fourth M car after the M1, M535i, M635 CSi, and M5, and arguably most important. But if your M-centric tastebuds prefer a more modern take on the German brand's most driver-friendly vehicles, take a look at the videos below. Related Video: