2013 BMW 6-Series Gran Coupe

BMW’s 6-Series line adds a “4-door coupe” to answer the Audi A7 andMercedes-Benz CLS-Class. With showcar styling and improvements shared with the latest 2-door 6s, the Gran Coupe could be the new glamour star for the world’s top-selling premium vehicle brand.


BMW adds a second “4-door coupe” with a new 6-Series model that was previewed by the Gran Coupé Concept at the April 2010 Beijing Auto Show. The slinky sedan will be the style star for a rapidly expanding BMW car fleet that already includes a coupe-style 4-door, the X6 premium-midsize crossover SUV. The 6-Series Gran Coupe, once rumored as a new “8-Series,” stands to be more popular, being a direct challenger to the highly successful Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class, redesigned for 2012, and Audi’s sleek new 2012 A7 hatchback. U.S sales should be underway by mid-2012, a few months after the car’s European launch.



The 2013 BMW 6-Series Gran Coupe was planned to be somewhat more “gran” than it’s turned out. Remember the Concept CS from the 2007 Shanghai Auto Show? That exercise set tongues to wagging, with many predicting a little-changed production version to be named Gran Turismo. But nothing came of it. As BMW design chief Adrian van Hooydonk told Britain’sAutocar magazine at Beijing, “We all liked the idea of a more dynamic flagship 4-door then, but we put the [CS] ‘on ice’ to work on Project i, which has been a bigger priority.” Project i is BMW’s “Sustainable Mobility” initiative involving high-tech pure-electric and hybrid vehicles to be marketed as a semi-separate brand. Its first fruits are the i3 electric city car (aka “Megacity Vehicle”), expected for model-year 2013, and the i8range-extender “eco supercar,” due for 2014. Once those products were far enough along, management apparently decided to resume work on the kind of “aspirational” products that have helped make BMW the world’s top-selling premium-vehicle brand.

In short, the 2013 BMW 6-Series Gran Coupe picks up where the Concept CS left off. Indeed, van Hooydonk told Autocar that the 2010 Beijing concept amounted to an updated CS. “Our intention was to create a car with a distinct character. I’m hoping you can tell that it’s not a 7-Series replacement...” By contrast, the Concept CS was quite a bit longer and wider than the 7-Series, which it would have supplanted as BMW’s flagship car, had it seen production. As such, it was slated for high-power V8 and V12 engines that, like the car itself, were suddenly rendered politically incorrect by the global economic meltdown of 2008-09 and the wild fuel-price fluctuations that accompanied it.