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Behind the Scenes of BMW's 'Drift Mob,' Part 2 [w/video]

After spending four days practicing about a dozen drift stunt moves in a parking lot for an upcoming BMW "Drift Mob" internet mini-film, Rhys Millen, Sam Hübinette, Dai Yoshihara, Rich Rutherford, and Conrad Grunewald are finally ready for show time. We are brought to the huge urban traffic circle to see the stunts performed midway through the day to observe for a couple of hours.
The undertaking is massive, with multiple cameras set up, scores of crew members, a helicopter filming from above, a rigged pickup for car-to-car shots, sidewalks lined with security and plenty of curious onlookers, and oh, yeah, a major intersection of a top world city shut down for an entire weekend.
The five drifting legends are nestled in their identical red BMW M235i coupes, which have been modified with special handbrakes but essentially nothing else you can't get on a stock version, and are listening to direction from director Mic Rodgers and stunt coordinator Riley Harper. We're basically given free rein of the set, to shoot the cars, the drivers, and at one point, even hopping in with Yoshihara for one of the admittedly more tame stunts. Even then, the g-forces are so severe that they flip our cameraphone's video recording from landscape mode to portrait. Yes, this is a pretty cool day to be reporting on cars, and as we said during our first installment of our behind the scenes coverage of Drift Mob, we're honored to be the only US media outlet here to tell the tale.

BMW X4 slantback is nearly here

Another day, another new BMW spied. Sometimes it feels like Bimmer is developing so many new models that in the future, every buyer will get their own unique car. The latest one spied is the upcoming BMW X4 that was launched as a concept nearly a year ago. The Bavarians still see a need to camouflage the rear end of its prototypes, though.
As you can see, the production version is hewing very closely to the concept. If you peer around the camo, the headlights have the same shape, but the foglights are a new addition. The rear roofline seems quite similar to concept, too, but the back end is still somewhat more mysterious because the masking and dirt hide a lot. Still, it doesn't seem like the production model is going to be radically different from the concept based on the previous test cars we spied in the past. It also strikes us as very similar in size and form to the already available 3 Series Gran Turismo, with which it is expected to share a great deal.
Our wait might not be very long to see the midsize German CUV undisguised, because the X4's debut is rumored for the New York Auto Show on April 16 with a reveal as early as March 14.

BMW rethinks all-wheel-drive M cars

BMW M hasn't been able to decide whether it wants to jump on the all-wheel-drive bandwagon or not (with the exceptions of the X5 M and the X6 M, which are based on AWD architecture). That might be changing though, since M's president Friedrich Nitschke recently realized that 70 to 80 percent of Mercedes-Benz E63 AMGs are ordered with all-wheel drive. Earlier this year, Nitschke said that there were no new AWD M models planned, so this comes as somewhat of a surprise.
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive, but it won't come before we get the successor of the M5 and M6," Nitschke said in a Motoring report. "That's the timing and it's not practical to react in the current life cycles."
"On our cars we are thinking of all-wheel drive." - Friedrich Nitschke, BMW