Thought the BMW XM was wild? Wait til you get a load of BMW’s Dune Taxi, which mysteriously dropped this morning in a video on the YouTube channel of BMW Middle East.
The Dune Taxi is an all-electric off-roader that looks suspiciously like an Extreme E racer, and clearly isn’t earmarked for production. So it might simply be a promotional tool for BMW’s real xDrive SUVs that it meets during the course of the video, including the X6M, iX and, at the very end, and in a static appearance only, the Concept XM.
Or more likely BMW is dropping a big hint that it plans to enter the Extreme E off-road championship. Strangely, BMW hasn’t released any details about the Dune Taxi’s intentions. We’ve reached out to the company to find out more and are waiting to hear back.
Until that happens, all we’ve got to go on is what we can see by looking at the Dune Taxi and the few technical details that flash up on the screen during the film. We can see, for example, that it has two gullwing doors, a low-profile roof snorkel, and slim LED lights. The fastback shape gives the profile the look of a sportier X6, but the raised fenders and low bonnet line look more like something you’d see on a supercar. A look at the current crop of Extreme E racers, which all use the same running gear and and only slightly different bodywork, shows that the Dune Taxi is almost identical.
Related: Production 2023 BMW XM Revealed In New Patent Photos With Subtle Design Changes
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Glimpses of the interior show a sturdy roll cage and a Cosworth logo mounted low down on the center console – Cosworth says its electronics feature prominently in the Odyssey 21, the official name for the Extreme E series racers. Text overlays add a little more info, explaining that “Dune Taxi Electric Prototype” is fitted with a natural fiber reinforced polymer body, offers 400 mm (15.8-inches) of wheel travel, and sends 400 kW (536 hp / 544 PS) and 1000 Nm (738 lb-ft) of torque to all four wheels. Again, that power figure also matches the spec of current Extreme E cars.
Judging by the way the Dune Taxi slides through traffic with rally ace Abdo Feghali at the wheel, having first stopped to pick up TV’s Outer Banks’ star, Madelyn Cline, that power setup looks to be heavily rear-biased. And in one section where we see it performing a triple-car drift around a roundabout alongside a pair of X6 Ms driven by Red Bull’s Driftbrothers, it’s clear that the prototype’s suspension is far softer, judging from the massive lean angles.
The video closes with the XM ascending the monster 130-degree Tal Moreeb sand dune near Liwa, before Cline exits and walks over to the Concept XM, whose production car brother is set to be unveiled on September 27. We’ll update this story when BMW has got back to us with more info.
Would you like to see BMW contest Extreme E? Leave a comment and let us know.
