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BMW has confirmed the next M3 will come in electric and petrol versions. It looks like a simple product decision, but it says far more about an industry still unsure what a performance car should be in the electric age.

For years the industry told a tidy story about all this. Electrification would arrive, petrol engines would fade into history, and badges like BMW’s M division would translate themselves into a new language of software and battery power. That confidence has not disappeared, but it has become a good deal more qualified, and the decision to build two M3s sits right in the middle of the doubt.

The electric BMW M3: quad motors and around 1,000bhp

The electric car, coded ZA0 internally and widely expected to wear an iM3 badge, is the more radical of the two. It uses four electric motors, one per wheel, built on BMW’s Neue Klasse architecture with an 800-volt system and a battery of more than 100kWh. Outright power is not in question. Estimates put it somewhere between 800 and 1,000bhp, which would make it comfortably the most powerful M3 ever built.

What matters more than the headline figure is how that power is handled. The four-motor layout lets BMW control torque at each wheel independently, and the front axle can be decoupled entirely, so the car can still behave like the rear-driven M3 enthusiasts know. BMW has even engineered simulated gear changes and a synthesised engine note, a clear signal that it wants the electric M3 to feel involving rather than merely quick.

Will there still be a petrol BMW M3?

Yes. Alongside the electric car, BMW will build a petrol-powered M3, known internally as G84 and expected to use an updated turbocharged straight-six, most likely with some hybrid assistance. It is often framed as the conservative option, but that misses the point. BMW is less interested in preserving the past than in reflecting a present that is still uneven.

The M3 has always occupied a particular space. It is a usable performance car, driven daily, taken on long journeys and expected to cope in all conditions. For buyers covering high motorway mileage, or without reliable home charging, the petrol version still fits that brief more naturally than any EV can yet manage. It also sits inside a more familiar ownership picture, with understood running costs, clearer depreciation and a lineage that stretches back to the original E30 of the mid-1980s. In a segment where the heart and the wallet are closely linked, that familiarity carries real weight.

What is BMW’s Heart of Joy system?

At the centre of the electric M3 is a control computer BMW calls Heart of Joy. It continuously distributes torque, manages stability and shapes the car’s responses in real time, taking over much of what used to be decided by mechanical hardware. It even replaces the limited-slip differential that has been central to the M3 since the E30, and BMW says it processes information many times faster than the systems it succeeds.

That shift matters beyond this one car. If software can shape a car’s character as much as its engine once did, then performance becomes less about what sits under the bonnet and more about what is running in the background. The result is a genuinely different kind of performance car, even if it wears the same three letters.

Electric vs petrol M3: what’s the difference?

The real significance is what all this does to the M3 badge itself. For close to four decades it has stood for a single evolving idea, each generation refining the last. That continuity is now breaking. For the first time the same badge will sit on two fundamentally different cars, one defined by combustion engineering, the other by electrification and software.

BMW is not trying to reconcile them. It is letting both run in parallel and, in effect, letting the market decide which one carries more weight. BMW’s M sales boss has indicated the two will share similar pricing, so buyers choose on drivetrain philosophy rather than cost.

When does the new BMW M3 go on sale?

The electric M3 is expected first, arriving in 2027, with the petrol G84 following around 2028. BMW has yet to confirm firm on-sale dates or final specifications, so both remain subject to change.

Taken together, the plan looks less like a decisive strategy and more like a hedge. BMW is building two competing M3s because it does not yet know which future its customers will choose, and neither does the rest of the industry. For a company that has spent forty years telling us exactly what an M3 is, that is a striking admission, and it makes the next M3 one of the most revealing cars of the coming decade.