2021 BMW 4 Series shows its nose less than a week before its debut

BMW published a dark preview image that shows the radically new 4 Series in the metal for the first time. The 3’s two-door sibling should have made its debut at an auto show but it will instead break cover online.

Although the next 4 Series is shrouded in darkness, we can immediately tell its front end borrows styling cues from the Concept 4 introduced at the 2019 Frankfurt auto show. That means its design is characterized by horizontal headlights with LED elements, big air vents chiseled into the bumper, and, yes, a jumbo rendition of BMW’s decades-old twin-kidney grille. Whether you love it or you hate it, it’s there and it’s not going anywhere. “Everybody who loves BMW will get used to it,” Domagoj Dukec, BMW’s head of design, told Autoblog.

That’s that, then. Looking beyond the grille, the second-generation 4 will wear the typical long hood, short trunk proportions we associate with a rear-wheel-drive coupe. It won’t be rear-wheel drive only, though. The lineup will initially include a 430i powered by a 255-horsepower, 2.0-liter turbo four, and a M440i xDrive variant with a 3.0-liter straight-six tuned to send 374 horsepower to the four wheels via an eight-speed automatic transmission. We don’t know if a six-speed manual will return, or if engineers have steered the 4 away from the land of stick-shifts.

BMW will introduce the next-generation 4 Series online on June 2, 2020, at 6 p.m. Munich time. If you want to follow along, either on the company’s official website or on its various social media channels, remember that’s noon in New York City and 9 a.m. in Los Angeles. The coupe will arrive in American showrooms as a 2021 model.

Looking ahead, the 4 Series family will grow with the addition of a convertible model, a Gran Coupe-badged four-door sedan with a fastback roofline, and a range-topping M4 that might offer all-wheel drive. At the other end of the spectrum, the electric i4 we saw as a design study earlier in 2020 will enter production in 2021.

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