To stay ahead of increasingly pesky carbon emissions regulations, BMW is relying on what it does best: engineering

MIRAMAS, FRANCE — BMW has a problem. In five years the company has to cut the amount of carbon dioxide belched out by its fleet of cars to just 95 grammes per kilometre, per model.

That means the average BMW by then should be as clean as a fuel-sipping Toyota Prius, a poster car for Green technology and a hybrid model that is perhaps the best symbol of how low-carbon cars can be today.

Right now the group’s fleet average emissions (which includes models from subsidiaries Mini and Rolls-Royce) are already a creditable 133g/km of CO2. BMW says no other carmaker has reduced tailpipe emissions as quickly or as dramatically over the last 15 years.

But if it doesn’t meet the 95g target, BMW risks hefty fines from the authorities in Europe and America.

Luckily the company has a solution. Or indeed, a whole bunch of them.

To meet the tightening requirements from regulators, BMW is heading down a number of technology paths.

There are the electric (or heavily electrified) and lightweight i3 and i8 cars, for starters. Designed from scratch to showcase the cutting edge in sustainable mobility today, they serve as halo models and burnish BMW’s Green credentials. They’re also spectacularly successful.

In less than a year, 12,000 of the BMW i models have already been sold worldwide. That’s a tiny percentage of BMW’s total volume of nearly 2 million cars a year, but it’s enough to oblige the company to speed up production.

BMW can build 110 i3 cars a day and 30 i8s. “The bottleneck is Leipzig,” says Cypselus von Frankenberg, BMW’s head of communications for new technologies, referring to the wind-powered plant the company set up for the i models.

Meanwhile, an army of engineers is working on ekeing out efficiency improvements in the regular line of petrol and diesel cars. A new engine family is being gradually phased in to replace today’s line of powerplants.

Though the latter are already highly efficient and powerful, the next generation of engines will bring incremental fuel savings that can be spread over millions of cars, for a broad environmental impact.

But there’s another breed of car on the way that blends the two approaches, combining major electrification with tradition combustion: the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV), like this 3 Series prototype.

Other carmakers are fans of the approach, too. You can buy a plug-in hybrid version of the Porsche Panamera today, while Mitsubishi is planning to market the Outlander PHEV here.

Arch-rivals Audi and Mercedes-Benz have PHEV versions of the A3 and S-Class respectively, though neither are for sale here.

In contrast, BMW is planning to add plug-in hybrid “eDrive” systems to every one of its core models.

The X5 eDrive will be the first plug-in vehicle to go on sale, for Californian soccer moms to feel good (or extra good) about driving a big SUV.

The 3 Series is next because it is globally the brand’s best-selling saloon, so it offers scope for economies of scale.

At the top end of the market the next 7 Series (due at next September’s Frankfurt show) will also get the plug-in treatment, but even the 2 Series ActiveTourer is on the eDrive list.

It helps that the technology is fairly modular. In the 3 Series-based prototype we drove, the electric motor fit entirely within the housing of its eight-speed transmission. 

Presumably, any BMW that uses the same gearbox (and the vast majority of them do) can accept the same system, as long as there’s also space for a battery bank and some control modules.

And there will be, because these days every new BMW and Mini is being developed with PHEV requirements in mind. No customer wants to sacrifice practicality for battery space, after all.

That’s why the 3 Series prototype still has folding rear seats and most of its boot space, says Ferdinand Wiesbeck, a development engineer working on the car’s energy management system.

Other things on the car need more work. Whenever the petrol engine fires up to give the car a boost, it needs to do so more smoothly, for example.

“It’s mainly the shifting, the starting up of the engine where we still want to put some refinement in. There’s a lot of situations where it works perfectly, but 100 percent of the situations have to work perfectly,” says Mr Wiesbeck. 

“We’re still building a BMW.”

But if a family of ultra-frugal BMWs is something to look forward to between now and 2020, the company is already exploring ideas for the future beyond that.

One of them is “Power eDrive”, a concept that turns the current approach to electrification upside down.

In a PHEV BMW, two thirds of the power is from the petrol engine while the rest is from the electric motor. Power eDrive reverses that ratio, so electric drive is the star and petrol is the supporting player.

There’s no prototype as such, but engineers have squeezed relevant components into a 5 Series GT to try out the idea. “I can’t tell you how much it weighs, but it’s heavy,” says Philip Morrison, an engineer on the project. “We just put in everything we have at the moment in it.”

“Everything” means two powerful motors and a small petrol engine (BMW won’t say what it is, but it sounds suspiciously like the i8’s 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbo when revved). They produce around 600 horsepower altogether.

The target range in EV mode is 100km (though the petrol engine can top up the juice on the fly, creating a 600km to 800km range), so you know the batteries must be huge if they can feed a pair of high-power motors for that far. That explains why the demo car is so porky.

But it’s also bloody fast. Peter Schoplocher, another engineer on the Power eDrive team, is one of only three people in all of BMW authorised to drive the demo car, and he invites me into the passenger seat to feel the acceleration that BMW thinks an electric vehicle should have. Basically, a hell of a lot.

Mr Schoplocher brings the car to a halt before short straight, then floors the accelerator. The 5 Series GT lurches forward in eerie silence at first, but the motors start to whirr while the petrol engine wakes up to join in, and suddenly it’s accelerating with frightening intensity, the kind your organs can feel.

In just a few seconds I see 160km/h on the speedo, but then Mr Schoplocher backs off. “I’m not running out of power, I’m running out of track,” he says, grinning. I’m writing this the day after the experience, and I don’t think my eyebrows have climbed back down yet.

This Power eDrive stuff is nuts, but it’s also thrilling. And it’s nice to think that the ascendance of battery power needn’t be dull or, with petrol to supplement it, inconvenient. “The idea is to have an electric car without ever worrying about range,” says Mr Schoplocher.

The Power eDrive team reckons the concept will be scalable between 250 and 600 horsepower, to make it applicable to a wide range of future models. 

It’s early days yet, though. BMW says the system will only really take shape in the future, when it expects battery capacity to double and motors to become more powerful. Other challenges remain in the interim. “We need things to be smaller, cheaper and lighter,” says Mr Morrison.

Even the “Power eDrive” tag isn’t set in stone. “That’s just a working title,” says Mr von Frankenberg, the communications head. “But it’s a good description of what you feel in the car.”