I'll say upfront: I'm a wagon guy. I own a B9 RS4 Avant and I will defend the long roof to anyone who'll listen (and several people who won't). So when I tell you BMW is sitting on the bones of a genuinely great electric wagon and doing absolutely nothing with it, understand this isn't idle wishlisting. This is frustration.
The BMW i4 M50 is, for all intents and purposes, already 90% of the way there.
It's a four-door liftback. It's got the sleek, low-slung proportions that make wagons look good rather than bloated. It's packing around 400 kW and 795 Nm through all four wheels, which is enough to make your passengers very quiet very quickly. And because it's built on BMW's CLAR platform with batteries in the floor, the packaging already lends itself to a longer rear overhang without messing up the weight distribution.
DMARGE's render of the i4 M50 Touring in Kith Green
You wouldn't even need to call it a Touring. Call it a Shooting Brake. Give it a subtle roofline extension, a raked rear hatch, maybe 20mm more glass in the D-pillar, and you'd have something that looks like it was always supposed to exist. The proportions are already there. The silhouette practically begs for it.
And here's the thing nobody at BMW seems willing to acknowledge: the electric wagon space is essentially empty.
Your options right now, if you want a proper electric wagon from a premium brand? The Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo, which starts at a number that makes your eyes water. And the BMW i5 M60 Touring, which is a lovely thing by all accounts but costs $219,900 before on-road costs in Australia. That's not a car. That's a house deposit with wheels.
Below that? Nothing. The MG 5 EV exists in some markets, sure, but comparing it to what an i4 M50 Touring could be is like comparing a garden hose to a fire truck. They both move water. That's where the similarities end.
The current sedan version of the i4 M50
And this is where BMW Australia's recent decisions make my head spin. They've just axed the i4 M50 from the local lineup entirely, leaving us with a single eDrive35 variant at $88,990. One flavour. 210 kW. Rear-wheel drive only. It's a perfectly fine car, but it's like ordering a steak and being told the kitchen only does chicken now.
The i4 M50 was the one that made people stop and reconsider the whole EV thing. It proved you could have a fast, engaging BMW that happened to be electric. The 2026 model was even getting a name change to M60, with power bumped to 442 kW in Sport mode. That's not a car that needs to be put out to pasture. That's a car that needs a bigger boot.
I should also say: I've driven a lot of electric cars and most of them are, hand on heart, pretty terrible as wagons. Not because they can't make them, but because they won't. Every manufacturer defaults to the SUV because the numbers say crossovers sell. And they do. But the numbers also said nobody wanted the M3 Touring, and then BMW couldn't build them fast enough.
The i4 Touring that various render artists have imagined over the years always looked right, and that's not nothing. When a car's proportions translate this easily into a different body style, it usually means the underlying design was strong to begin with. The i4 M50 has that. The long bonnet, the tight greenhouse, the muscular rear haunches. Stretch the roofline, rake the tailgate, don't touch the front end or the stance, and you've got something that could genuinely compete with the Taycan Sport Turismo at half the price.
There are roughly 2,400 words I could write about why this matters from a market positioning standpoint, about how the Neue Klasse i3 might eventually offer a Touring variant but that's years away, about how BMW is leaving money on a table that Porsche is currently eating lunch on. But the argument is actually simpler than that.
The i4 M50 is a great car with a great powertrain and great bones. It's already got four doors. It's already got a liftback. The hardest part of making a wagon is the engineering underneath, and BMW has already done that bit. The easy part is the roof. And they still won't do it.
C'mon, Munich. Pull the trigger!!
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