Photo: BMW
Do you believe in coincidences? I do but not when they involve huge amounts of money and big carmakers around the world. That’s why the reveal of the water cooled turbocharged engine from BMW seems like an odd coincidence just before the company will take the veils off the new M4 GTS.
We’ve seen it testing around the world for quite some time now but we didn’t imagine that it could be hiding such technology under that rather stock body and huge wing located on the trunk. And yet, here we are today, looking at something that seems to have been taken out of science-fiction stories and strapped to the body of a car.
Don’t think that BMW is revolutionizing anything here. This kind of cooling system for turbocharged/supercharged engine has been around for over 70 years but nobody actually put it in mass production. The issue was that if you get the air/water mixture wrong, everything goes south.
Get the moisture just a tad bit too high or too low and all your work will have been for nothing. That’s why it took BMW so long to introduce it. Now they have the technology and software needed to make it work and it could become reality.
Launching it on a limited model such as the GTS M4 make sense too. If it turns out to be a flop, only a rather small number of cars will be affected so the risk taken is smaller. If it turns out to be great and reliable, the world will revere the car as a marvel and it will raise its price tag over the years.
Either way, we should expect a rather decent increase in power and efficiency for the S55 engine with the water injection cooling system. At the moment we can only guess what the numbers can be though, as BMW was tight lipped about the whole thing. It could be close to 500 HP though which would make the M4 GTS a proper rival even for the Mercedes-AMG GT.
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