Inline-six-cylinder and V8 engines from the BMW M division will carry on through the introduction of upcoming, tougher Euro 7 emissions regulations, and they will do so with no loss in performance, BMW M CEO Frank Van Meel has told Autocar.
While the emissions levels permitted are unchanged from the current Euro 6e to upcoming Euro 7 regulations, these will be tested over a wider and more demanding range of scenarios which are said to better reflect real-world driving, according to the publication.
These emissions levels must be compliant for a period of 10 years, or 200,000 km of mileage, which is twice as long as current regulations demand. Euro 7 regulations will also monitor brake and tyre emissions for the first time, it added.
According to Van Meel, “the challenge was not so much to make an engine that is EU7 compliant, but to keep performance,” the report wrote.
“The whole story is about driving with lambda one – when the air-fuel ratio for combustion is perfectly matched – so you have to keep that, and there’s no cooling. Normally, if you are in high-performance situations, you cool using the fuel. With EU7, that’s impossible, so you need to find different ways of avoiding temperature build-up,” he said.
“The combustion process has to be improved in regards to heat build-up and also the cooling, and those are the challenges. Of course you can [reduce] performance to avoid this temperature increase, but you don’t want to – that’s where we started. The new balance of performance is that we drive lambda one, but we don’t want to lose performance,” he continued.
Without going into detail on how the M division has revised its engines to attain these targets, Van Meel said that the firm has made some “very interesting” alterations that it will reveal in due course.
“The six-cylinder in-line engine is our legacy, and the V8 has got a long history in racing, so we intend to keep going,’ Van Meel said. In reply to whether or not the M division would consider downsizing to three- or four-cylinder engines with more electrification in order to reduce emissions, Van Meel simply said ‘no’, according to Autocar.
The downsized engines with increased electrification cannot meet the M division’s “very specific mindset” for how it wants performance cars to drive, where torque delivery, rev ranges, and weight of vehicles are concerned, the CEO of the brand’s high performance division said. “I couldn’t imagine putting a four-cylinder in an M5,” he said.
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