Photography courtesy BMW
From the archives, Autostrada Magazine, March 2025: During 2025 Monterey Car Week, we sat down with BMW M CEO Franciscus van Meel to discuss 50 years of BMW M and the uncertain future of performance in the electrified era. At the time, enthusiast anxiety around EV performance cars was reaching a fever pitch, but Van Meel remained remarkably calm about the transition, comparing today’s skepticism to past controversies surrounding xDrive, turbocharging and even the evolution of the M3 itself. Nearly a year later, with BMW’s next-generation Neue Klasse performance models beginning to take shape publicly, many of his comments now feel surprisingly prescient.
A select group of five individuals are gathered in a BMW branded racing trailer beside the WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Cars on the nearby track scream by, their engines spiking the audio recorders of the few journalists present as they group around their subject. They are there for 2025 Monterey Car Week, yes, but also to fete a massive milestone for the German brand: 50 years of BMW M.
Who better to hear about it from than Mr. M himself, CEO of BMW M, Franciscus Van Meel?
How are you enjoying Car Week?
That was a rhetorical question, I guess? No, it’s great. Every day is a new surprise. It’s like a birthday every day. There’s so much happening. All the motorsport fans, car enthusiasts, all the cars. And of course we have brought our own cars here as well with the M5 Touring and the M5. All the generations, all the race cars out here. It’s an incredible atmosphere and it’s not just one event. For me it’s a conglomerate of events.
M celebrates 50 years this year. How have you been reflecting on this half century of history this year?
There’s so much to talk about after 50 years of M. It started in 1972…with racing, and M was actually the first company to pur racing technology into cars. And if you look at the 50 years of history, it’s still the same recipe. It has never changed. And that is the basic reflection on 50 years. It has grown. We started out with 400 homologation cars, and last year we sold 202,000 vehicles.
What are M’s most significant milestones to date?
Oh, there are so many. I think the first one was of course the start of M with the 3-liter CSL, the race car and homologation cars. Actuall the M5 was the first M car that was built in larger numbers, where we put racing technology into a series production car.
And then of course there were a lot of smaller milestones like with the M3, which actually is the core of our brand right now. But then later on we had M4, we had convertibles, we had the M2 added to the program. We had SUVs coming to the program, marking another milestone.
What excites you the most about your role as CEO of BMW M?
Well, first of all it’s an honor to have this job. I’m just happy to have the job and have freedom to propose what we want to do. And the board and the supervisory board actually gave a green light, so it’s a lot of freedom.
What do you see as the biggest challenge in maintaining BMW M’s legacy while innovating for the future?
Well, I think a big challenge now is electrification because there’s a lot of anxiety and even a bit of fear in markets because they actually cannot see electrification being really cool right now…. They can’t see the innovation on the track or in a real high performance car, which is true. That’s why they are not there yet. So that is a big challenge.
It reminds me a little bit of the MX drive system because when we decided to go with the F90 M5 with an MX drive system, and I said that at the Detroit Motor Show in January 2015, I can still remember, I had a shit storm for two years as peopple said the M5 now was finally dead because it was no more a rear-wheel-driven DCT race track car. It would only go straight forward, no agility, no dynamics anymore. And then when it came out everyone said, ‘oh that’s crazy’. And I said, I’ve been telling you because we know what we’re working on. We drive those cars. So we could already see it’s a rear-wheel-drive car with more traction. It’s not a four-wheel-drive car. But actually we had to just wait until the cars were there and people could drive them and see for themselves.
Or of the M3 we started out with four cylinder engines coming from Formula One. Then we changed to a six cylinder and everyone was saying ‘that’s too heavy on the front axle, that’s no Formula One engine, that’s not going to work…’ And then we changed to a V8 higher-rev and everyone said, ‘a V8 on the front axle, that’s stupid’. But that too was better. And then we changed to a six cylinder back again, in that case turbocharged, and everyone said that was stupid, but then everyone found out it’s cooler, more powerful. So we’ve been through this a number of times, but I think electrification is the biggest psychological step probably from a customer perspective because they don’t know what to expect. They can only extrapolate what they see right now. And I can understand that, but the problem is I already see what we’re working on. I can only say that’s going to be crazy. I mean it’s going to be a huge step forward.
What do you think will define the next generation of performance vehicles, and how is BMW M preparing for that future?
Well I think for us since it has been the same for 50 years, it’s all about motorsport and emotion. And motorsport stands for precision, agility and dynamics. And I think that is what you want to have in an M car and that has to be the same in the future as well. For us it’s quite easy because that’s what you need to deliver. An M Car has to be an M Car.
Why did you decide to finally bring this M5 to North America? What’s changed to make it a fit?
It’s quite a complicated story, but we started the discussion already with the M3 touring. However when we started out with the M3 Touring, it was because we have grown so strongly that we said now there’s space for additional cars in our portfolio. But at that time the US was still a little bit let’s say reserved in regards to volume as was the rest of the world. Now that we see how the M3 Touring is performing in the rest of the world, especially in Europe, it’s exceeding all expectations, that was a sign. And we were not going to stop with the M3 Touring because there is a huge demand. And when we took a closer look at the United States, because there was a lot of demand for touring and it was increasing especially for a bigger Touring with the V8 and a lot of comforts, we said okay, this time we’re going to include the U.S..
How does customer feedback influence your process? Can you give an example of something that was changed or evolves due to customer feedback?
Normally what we do is we get a lot of feedback when we launch our cars or when we are at M festivals or M activities. One of the things we heard about these experiences was a request for training on ‘how to drift my car’ for example. That’s why we developed the drift analyzer, which you can have in your M high performance car so that you can see what your drift angles were and how long you kept the drift. And you can also have a 10-step setting for assistance in drifting, from completely supported where it’s almost not possible to drift to completely all systems off. You can go stepwise up so you can train yourself. That was a development we did because a lot of customers said that something was missing.
When in 59 years the auto-historians look back at this point in time and what you’re doing, what do you think they’ll say?
They’ll say they kept a cool hat. Their motto was ‘stick to what you’re doing’. Don’t go sideways and just continue. And don’t turn left or right if the customers are not willing to go left or right, because some want to go left and the others want to go right. So you have to offer a whole broad portfolio so that if someone says ‘I want to drive a combustion engine in 2028 I should be able to buy an engine with a combustion engine’ and if someone says ‘I like the electric one better’, you have to offer the better electric one.
And what do you want to be remembered for?
I’d like to be remembered as the one that brought BMW M to new heights. I actually helped bring it up from 30,000 – 40,000 to over 200,000 without losing the DNA, and also to transform it into a new age without losing our heritage.