A camouflaged BMW X5 M prototype rolled through the gates of the M Test Centre at the Nürburgring last week, and the footage tells a story BMW hasn’t officially confirmed yet. The G95 — an all-electric, full-blooded M car — is real, it’s testing, and it’s still roughly two years from showrooms.
The spy video, captured by PrototypeHunters, shows a heavily disguised SUV that appears to wear a smaller kidney grille than the standard iX5, though layers of cladding make definitive design reads impossible at this stage. The front bumper carries beefier air intakes and a mesh panel above the license plate that suggests additional cooling. These are details first glimpsed on a prototype spotted in early June.
This is not an M Performance trim. This is the top-shelf M.
BMW has already confirmed that every future full-fledged M car will run a quad-motor powertrain. The math from there gets interesting fast. The iX5 60 xDrive already puts down 570 horsepower and 593 pound-feet of torque in standard trim, with an M Performance variant slotted above it.
The X5 M, then, sits at the summit, where projections land somewhere between 800 and 900 horsepower. That’s supercar territory stuffed into a two-and-a-half-ton SUV.
The more revealing twist is that BMW isn’t picking sides. A combustion-powered X5 M is being developed in parallel, expected to carry a reworked version of the twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter V8 with mild-hybrid assistance and north of 600 horsepower. Both the EV and ICE versions are slated for a 2028 debut, reportedly within the same calendar year, and both should look nearly identical from the outside.
That dual-track strategy is deliberate. Five years after the i4 M50 first slapped an M badge on an electric BMW, the division still hasn’t delivered a car that purists recognize as a genuine M product. The M3 and X3 M, due next year, will be the first.
The X5 M would follow as a larger, louder statement of intent — in two flavors, because BMW clearly isn’t ready to bet the M brand on batteries alone.
There are landmines on the ICE side. BMW has already been forced to detune the S68 V8 in the M5 and XM to satisfy European emissions rules. Whether the new X5 M’s combustion engine escapes the same fate is an open question nobody at M GmbH seems eager to answer publicly.
Design cues are starting to coalesce across the M lineup. The X5 M will adopt the yellow X light motif and M-specific mirror caps already seen on the X5 M60e plug-in hybrid. It will also get Track Lights — stacked cube elements embedded in the front and rear bumpers — first previewed on the M Concept Neue Klasse and destined for every future M model.
The timeline stacks up logically. The X5 M60e just launched. The V8-powered X5 M60 and an electric M Performance derivative come next. The full M treatment sits at the back of the queue, which puts 2028 as the earliest realistic window.
What the Nürburgring footage really captures is a company running two expensive, parallel development programs for the same nameplate — one that needs charging infrastructure and one that needs catalytic converters. BMW is hedging with the confidence of a house that can afford to place chips on both numbers. Whether the market rewards that bet, or punishes the complexity, is the question that 2028 will answer.
Share this Story