What BMW has confirmed is that the VDE is powered by four electric motors – one for each wheel – and can produce peak torque of 13,269lb ft.
And no, that’s not a typo. There isn’t an ofofficial power output, but given its ridiculous torque output, you can probably guess it’s pretty high. BMW hasn’t given any performance stats, either, but after my ride in it, I would say the 0-62mph time can be described as ‘brisk’.
Beyond the four motors, the other thing we have been told about are those fans. Five of them, in fact. BMW calls them impellers, and they serve to literally suck the car to the ground.
Each fan requires 50kW of energy to run, but combined they add around 1000kg of downforce without creating any drag, in turn allowing Klingmann to push even harder in corners.
All of that torque and downforce is really there to develop one small but very significant black box full of computer chips and loaded with software.
That would be BMW’s new Heart of Joy, the unusually named hardware and software stack that will unify the computer systems that run the powertrain and driving dynamics systems on future EVs into a single unit.
It’s the first time BMW has unified those systems, and the firm claims the system has been developed entirely in-house.
“The Heart of Joy will run all the key driving functions of the car,” says BMW driving dynamics expert Christian Thalmeier. “But to develop those, we need to push the technology.
Even production cars with only one electric motor will gain advantages from the work we’re doing on a car with four motors.”
It might seem like overkill to build a superpowerful, fan-laden development hack just to test a computer processing unit, but the idea is that if the Heart of Joy can handle anything the VDE can throw at it in the real world, it can handle pretty much anything.
So how does it work? Traditionally, the powertrain and driving dynamics systems have been separate units.