New Concept Car: BMW Concept 4-Series Coupe

That lowness also might be due to what we’re guessing are deeper-than-stock front and rear fascias. The concept—and surely the production version—is more deliberately contoured than was the previous car, with all manner of swoops and swages. It is the current fashion to make a car’s bodywork look like metal skin stretched tight over bone and muscle. Straight panels are passé. The concept’s all-LED headlights and L-shaped taillights look something like stretched versions of those of the current 3-series sedan.

Also, the 4-series concept has something called, and we’re not making this up, an Air Breather. This, it turns out, is the vent behind each front wheel that is “aerodynamically effective” at affecting the aerodynamics in some way that’s way better than the adhesive-backed kind you’d buy at Pep Boys. BMW claims they extract air from the front wheel wells. The body is painted Liquid Silver Metallic and it’s trimmed out in satin-finish aluminum. The interior gets some fine-looking chestnut wood trim and leather seats, tanned in an environmentally friendly way and then trimmed with braided leather strips. The braided leather also finds its way to, of all places, the insides of the cup holders, which, well, that just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Mechanical specifications? Pfft. The only thing BMW is saying about the car is that it has unique 20-inch aluminum wheels, which the company jammed deep into the wells.

That said, we do know that the production 4-series will borrow the turbocharged engines from its sedan sibling, which means the 328i’s 240-horse four and the 335i’s 300-hp six. (Whether the production cars will be called 428i and 435i, or if they’ll adopt higher numbers for maximum “exclusivity,” isn’t yet clear.) Transmissions will include a six-speed manual and an eight-speed automatic. This car also will serve as the basis for the next-generation M3 coupe, which might be called the M4. The production version of the basic coupe reaches dealers in the fall of 2013.

Thanks to: Car and Driver