[Photos] First Real Life Look at the BMW Concept Z4!

The BMW Z4 concept has just been revealed to the public at Pebble Beach and BMW says it is more than just a show car. In these first real life photos, we see that it has a long, low, wide design, with big air intakes and massive wheels hinting at its performance focus. In fact, says van Hooydonk, “the car has become a lot more dynamic than any Z4” before it.

“It is giving you a hint, a very close hint, of what the production car will look like next year,” says BMW global design chief Adrian van Hooydonk. The production car will be the new Z4 roadster and this sports car will be co-developed with Toyota.

In the front a new headlight design and a wider grille shape take center stage: “Overall we have a completely new facial expression,” says van Hooydonk. And moving to the side, note that the clamshell hood’s shutline runs into a body crease that stretches toward the rear of the car. “There is really only one line that matters,” van Hooydonk explains, with a “very interesting play, we believe, between sharp lines and soft body areas.”

The interior is very interesting. The driver’s side is finished in black while the left-hand side of the interior is finished in tan. BMW did this to emphasize that this car is aimed at performance driving. “The cockpit is really center around the driver, both in geometry and in color,” he says. There’s an automatic transmission shifter in the console – a bummer for anyone hoping for a stick-shift Z4 – and a racy steering wheel with a red “race” button on its rim.

This concept car is like the 8 Series Concept in a sense that they preview BMW’s next generation of styling cues. Van Hooydonk says one of the big goals with the new design language was making it “cleaner.” Where car design had for several years been adding ever more lines and creases, the new BMW language will have fewer of them. He says that BMW realized it could still create striking cars but without using as many lines. “The form language will become cleaner, more precise,” he says.

Hooydonk also notes that previously, BMW would wait a long time to introduce new styling cues, often as long as a decade. Now, he says, designers try to push out new design language as soon as possible on new vehicles. So expect BMW to drop only the freshest design more often than before.