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BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coup'e bows at Villa d'Este

The first collaboration between BMW and Pininfarina is this blunt-force two-door called the BMW Pininfarini Gran Lusso Coupe revealed at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este. Said to be the "interpretation of a luxurious BMW Coupé as seen through the eyes of Pininfarina," once you get past all of the design-speak, you can focus on the full-bodied and keen-edged missile sitting on 21-inch wheels.
The long wheelbase makes for short overhangs. Up front, BMW's design language gets scraped across a whetstone, everything getting sharper, including the usually round cat's eye headlights that have gone dihedral. Under the hood is a V12, behind the twin-kidney grille in matte-sheen aluminium and high-gloss black. The same aluminum treatment also backs the taillights, the lenses designed to let air flow through them.
Inside is room for four, a cockpit canted toward the driver, Foglizzo leather in black and Tobacco Brown, 48,000-year-old kauri wood from New Zealand, deep pile carpet on the floors, a patterned virgin wool headliner and an "oblong aperture in the roof liner" set off by white LEDs.

BMW's DTM champ swaps rides with Mini's Dakar winner

BMW may not race in F1 any longer, and it doesn't compete with Audi and Porsche in the LMP1 class at Le Mans. It even shut down Mini's short-lived effort on the World Rally Championship. But that doesn't mean it doesn't race at all. In fact it's the current reigning champion both in DTM and at Dakar. So to highlight its varied motorsport programs, the German automaker had two of its top drivers swap rides. German driver Martin Tomczyk, who won the DTM title in 2011 and now drives for BMW, took to Nasser Al-Attiyah's Mini All4Racing Countryman on the sand dunes of Dubai. Meanwhile the Qatari driver, who has won the Dakar Rally two times now, took to the wheel of Tomczyk's BMW M4 DTM around Oschersleben in Germany. They even repeated the game of musical chairs at Hockenheim over the weekend. If anything, the promo clip shot by Red Bull just goes to show how different the varied racing machinery can be, and the challenges posed to racing drivers switching between disciplines. But lessons aside, it's a cool clip, so check it out above. Two champions swap cockpits: Martin Tomczyk drives the MINI ALL4 Racing, Nasser Al-Attiyah the BMW M4 DTM. Munich (DE), 1st May 2015. From asphalt to sand and back again: BMW DTM driver Martin Tomczyk (DE) and MINI ALL4 Racing ace Nasser Al-Attiyah (QA) both entered unfamiliar territory and took each other's cars for a test drive. As part of a video shoot for BMW Motorsport Premium Partner Red Bull in Dubai (AE), Tomczyk, a proven master of his trade on asphalt as the 2011 DTM Champion, took the wheel of the MINI ALL4 Racing, with which X-raid has won the famous Rally Dakar the last four years. During DTM testing in Oschersleben (DE), Al-Attiyah was given the opportunity to drive Tomczyk's BMW M Performance Parts M4 DTM. Two wins at the Rally Dakar are just some of the successes the rally driver from Qatar has had to date. He followed up his first victory in 2011 by winning in the MINI ALL4 Racing in January 2015. "Driving the MINI ALL4 Racing through the sand and over the dunes in Dubai was a fascinating experience and was so much fun," said Tomczyk. "The car has an incredible amount of torwue – and the test in the dunes was an amazing adrenalin rush even for an experienced race driver such as myself. It's totally different to driving on a circuit.

BMW to change model designations, further yet from actual displacement?

Once upon a time, you could look at the back of a trunk lid of a BMW and come up with a pretty fair idea of what sat under its hood. For example, a 320i was a 3 Series with a fuel-injected, 2.0-liter engine, a 328i was a 3 Series with a fuel-injected, 2.8-liter engine and a 328Ci was a two-door 3 Series with the same engine. Those were good days.
Today, though, that simplicity is dead and gone. A 328i now has a 2.0-liter engine, just like the 320i, while the simple "C" designation that was affixed to two-door models has been replaced with a "4," so we have a 428i and a 435i. It gets worse, though. A 550i uses a 4.4-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 (it should be a 544ti, although we'd be willing to hear an argument for "tti") and a 740i uses a 3.0-liter, turbocharged six-cylinder, which is the same engine found in a 535i. It's madness.
And, well, it's about to get madder, if a post on a BMW enthusiast forum is to be believed. According to f30post.com, we could see a shakeup in at least the 3 and 4 Series nomenclature, thanks to an impending refresh that will see the addition of new, turbocharged four- and six-cylinder engines, codenamed B48 and B58, respectively.