These are the first spy shots of the upcoming 8-Series Gran Coupe, which is a longer, four-door version of the recently launched Coupe.

The new member of the expanding 8-Series family was previewed by τηε M8 Gran Coupe concept at this year’s Geneva Motor Show. As the test car shows, the four-door 8-Series does a pretty good job at retaining the dynamic lines of the Coupe, only now it’s noticeably longer to make room for those extra rear doors.

This will enable BMW to go after other big sporty executive models like the Porsche Panamera and the Mercedes AMG GT4 Coupe, while those looking for al fresco motoring will have to wait for the Convertible.

The 8-Series Gran Coupe will pack BMW’s latest tech features, including a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster paired with a 10.25-inch display for the infotainment system, active anti-roll bars and a rather long list of driver assistance systems.

Don’t expect any surprises in the engine department; the 8-Series Gran Coupe will share the same powertrains with the Coupe, including the new twin-turbo 523hp 4.4-liter V8 and a 3.0-liter 315hp diesel straight-six, the latter available only to European customers.

As for the range-topping M8 Gran Coupe, we expect BMW to use the same oily bits with the current M5, meaning a twin-turbo 600hp V8 pared to a configurable all-wheel drive system. Some reports suggest that the M Division will increase the horsepower figure for the M8 a little, just to give its flagship M model the edge, but that remains to be seen.

BMW is expected to reveal the production version of the 8-Series Gran Coupe in 2019 as a 2020MY.

In 1987, BMW announced to the world that it was officially not screwing around anymore when it put a 5.0-liter V12 into production, setting a 300-horsepower standard for luxury and refinement. It was only a few years later that BMW would produce probably the ultimate V12, the 618-horsepower heart of the McLaren F1. But there was one engine sat in the middle that never quite made it into production, too big to live.

The car you’re looking at shouldn’t exist. It’s a prototype, and in most cases prototypes get crushed. But BMW never destroyed this one. I imagine it’s because nobody had the heart to do so.

This is the BMW M8 Prototype, a single vehicle built of what a true M car version of the original BMW E31 8 Series could look like.

The details of it are remarkably raw, particularly when viewed in the context of today’s all-wheel drive, automatic-equipped superlux M-branded SUVs and sedans.

The doors and wheel arches were carbon fiber. The windows were plexiglass. The pop-up headlights were deleted entirely.

New gauges read pressures to the driver, sat in a kevlar bucket seat with a body-strengthening B-pillar beside them, unlike the road car’s pillarless frame.

But the standout feature was the car’s engine. This is the 6064 cc “S70/1,” rumored to put out a good 550 horsepower, carbon fiber intakes running to twelve individual throttle bodies, cable-linked to the gas pedal unlike the drive-by-wire road car.

It is a sight to behold.

I requested these photos from BMW’s gracious historical archives, and I’ve never seen them anywhere else online. The engine looks like a black heart in the red prototype. It’s gleaming in its bay, absolutely monstrous.

I assumed that this was the engine that ultimately became the engine in the McLaren F1. After all, these M8 prototype photos are dated 1990, and it was only in 1993 that the F1 came out with its famous S70/2, displacing a very similar-sounding 6064cc. But then I turned up this passage in a BMW Blog write-up of the M8 prototype a few years back when BMW showed the car in its secret underground garage full of secret cars of great secrecy:

This all sounded a little vague, and things only got much more confusing when I asked BMW to clarify things.

First BMW sent me two links. The second was to the BMW archive’s official data sheet on the McLaren F1's S70/2. The first was to the BMW archive’s official data sheet on the S70/1. Only this data sheet said that the engine was a 5.6 liter, putting out a good-for-its-time 380 horsepower.

I replied, saying that I’d read that the engine in the M8 was a 6064cc engine. Was I wrong?

No, I wasn’t, as BMW (de-)clarified. The S70/1 was also the name given to the engine that was also called the S70B56, the production engine for the BMW 850CSi. That was the S70/1, but it wasn’t the same S70/1 that was in the M8 prototype. I asked for more of an explanation as to how the engines were different, and BMW sent me back this in an email:

I started to google around various combinations of “M8 Prototype” + “McLaren F1" + “S70/1,” getting mostly posts and re-posts of that old BMW Blog article, until I found a familiar name on a forum post from the time: Peloton25. For those of you who are not students of the McLaren F1, Peloton25 knows everything there is to know about these cars. He has read every book, seen every car, met every engineer.

When one person on VWVortex supposed that the M8 Prototype’s engine became the heart of the unique McLaren F1, Peloton25 set the record straight:

We’ve used Driving Ambition before, a memoir from an engineer who helped develop the McLaren F1. It’s a trustworthy source, and a good explanation of how the M8 prototype fits into the BMW V12 timeline. It may have been the contender for the F1's powerplant, but it was too big, physically big, to make it all work. It was an engine of extraordinary design, but the McLaren F1 needed to operate on a level above.

So the S70/1, the S70/1 in the M8, not the S70/1 in the 850CSi, was great and wonderful and powerful and beautiful. But it was too much for any normal road car, and not enough for that high water mark of the McLaren F1. It ended up lost in the middle.

That’s kind of a shame. I wish I might just once hear it road, those twelve throttle bodies barking down some test track, running away.

One of our spy photographers caught the upcoming 2020 BMW 8 Series out testing with nearly no camouflage covering it. The resulting photos give us our best look yet at the flagship convertible. While it does pretty much look like an 8 Series coupe with a retractable roof, there are a couple of very subtle changes.

Among those changes are the grille and the wheels. The lower outboard grilles feature a chrome crossbar and a vertical chrome accent. On the M850i coupe and the convertible prototypes we've seen, the crossbar is absent. The wheels are of a new multispoke design that isn't available on the M850i coupe as a standard or optional feature. They haven't been seen on convertible prototypes, either.

These changes may suggest this is a different trim level of 8 Series, maybe even with a different engine than the twin-turbocharged V8 of the M850i. But we can't say for sure, since contradicting that idea is a taped-over badge on this convertible's fender that's in the same place and roughly the same size as the M850i's M badge. Also, the rear fascia of the convertible is identical to the M850i convertible, down to the parallelogram-shaped exhaust tips. As such, it's also possible these cosmetic changes are just ways to differentiate an M850i convertible from the coupe.

Since BMW just revealed the 2019 8 Series coupe this year, we're expecting the convertible to follow next year. This is also likely considering that BMW has been testing the car simultaneously with the coupe, and this latest version is almost completely uncovered in the coupe's debut light blue color. It will probably offer the same engines as the coupe, meaning that it will have at least the V8 from the M850i, and possibly a lower-power engine option not long after launch.

Platform: The 8-series Gran Coupe will ride on a cut-and-sewn version of BMW’s Cluster Architecture (CLAR) platform, which also underpins the current 5-series, and is built with a mixture of various materials including steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber.