BMW has confirmed that its range of M-branded SUV models will expand in the coming years.
During an interview with Motoring, BMW M’s vice president of sales and marketing, Peter Quintus, said that in Australia, the high demand for performance-oriented SUVs is an indication of how the rest of the world feels.
“When we see what our customers want, we give that feedback directly to Munich… [More SUV models] make perfect sense and we will be looking in to that as part of our strategy moving forward in order to identify what opportunities actually exist to exploit that growing demand.
“If you look at the sales volumes of our regular models, I’m sure you can see where the potential is. Quite clearly there is potential in the SUV segment, and you will see in the near future some more M models,” Quintus confirmed.
Quintus did insist however that we shouldn’t expect a wave of new M models in the future, revealing that the company doesn’t intend on expanding its range to match the burgeoning fleet of Mercedes-AMGs. Instead, all future M models will need to adhere to its track-focused philosophy, he said.
“If you look at the current situation we have just 10 derivatives on the M side, the other competitors have double that number. Even so we have been able to make the same [sales] volume as our main competitor; so our philosophy is not to make every possible variant [an M car],” he said.
The most likely models to receive M variants are the X3 and X4.
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