BMW came agonizingly close to launching a convertible version of its legendary E34-generation M5 in the early 1990s. A prototype was built. A booth at the Geneva Motor Show was booked. And then someone at Munich pulled the plug, reportedly because they feared it would cannibalize sales of the 3-Series Convertible.
That reasoning, frankly, borders on absurd.
New details about the ill-fated drop-top M5 have surfaced courtesy of BMW Blog, filling in gaps on a car that has lived mostly in whispers and grainy photos tucked away in BMW’s secret basement archives. Road & Track’s own reviews director, Mike Duff, actually saw the thing in person back in 2009, buried among other shelved prototypes in one of the automaker’s locked-away collections.
The E34 M5 was never a volume play. BMW moved just 11,989 units worldwide across its entire 1989-to-1995 production run. The only alternative body style offered was the Touring wagon, and that accounted for a mere 891 examples.
A convertible variant would have likely attracted similarly modest numbers — nowhere near enough to dent 3-Series Convertible demand in any meaningful way. But corporate politics and internal product conflicts have killed better cars for worse reasons.
What BMW did build was essentially road-ready. The sole prototype packed the M5’s 315-horsepower inline-six cylinder engine under the hood and featured a hydraulically operated soft top. The engineers weren’t just sketching on napkins here — this was a fully functional machine with real engineering solutions already baked in.
The convertible’s two doors were stretched longer than those on the standard M5 sedan, making it easier for passengers to climb into the rear seats. The trunk was also extended to accommodate the folding soft-top mechanism. These are not the hallmarks of a casual design exercise.
According to reports, the M5 Convertible would have started at roughly £50,000 in the British market, which translated to about $90,000 in early-1990s American money. Adjusted for inflation, that figure swells past $200,000 today. Even at that price, there would have been buyers.
The E34 M5 remains one of the most revered sport sedans ever built, and a convertible version with that glorious naturally aspirated six would have been a collector’s grail from day one. Whether BMW would have ever shipped it stateside is another question entirely. The company had a habit of keeping its most interesting niche products on the European side of the Atlantic during that era.
The lone prototype still exists somewhere in BMW’s vaults, a tantalizing reminder of a path not taken. It sits alongside countless other what-ifs from an era when BMW’s M division was smaller, scrappier, and building cars with a purity of purpose that modern M products can only reference in marketing materials.
The E34 M5 Convertible would have been a glorious anomaly: a hand-built, low-volume, high-performance open-air grand tourer from a company that has never offered anything quite like it since. BMW has built M8 Convertibles and M4 Convertibles in the years since, but none would have carried the raw, mechanical charm of a top-down E34 with 315 horsepower singing through an intake manifold at redline.
Instead, it became a footnote — a car that was days from its public debut and decades from becoming one of the great automotive “what ifs.” The Geneva Motor Show booth sat empty, or was filled with something far less interesting. And somewhere in Bavaria, a soft-top M5 collects dust, waiting for a spotlight it was never allowed to have.
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