[xlover]

Originally Posted by mbanck

I don't think BMW ever said exactly why it was not viable to bring the G81 (M3 touring) stateside.

But one big factor AIUI was that the battery in the luggage compartment was not separated from the passenger compartment (in the touring, not the sedan/coupe), violating US-specific safety regulations. I'm not a G3x specialist, but a quick search seems to imply this was also the case for the G31 (current 5er touring).

So it could be that BMW decided to relocate the G61 and/or G99 battery to the front (and due to the hybrid battery likely being behind the driver/under the back seats, it could work from a weight distribution point of view), thus dodging this bullet. The federalization costs might mean the G99 is considerably (but not prohibitively) more expense than the G90 sedan and so the business case is still there for a limited edition (which then might not need federalization at all, not sure), we'll see...

This is pretty close to the situation for the M3 wagon as I read it. Insiders commented quite a bit on the early threads about the wagon: beyond the certification hurdle, because the G21 was never designed with any us market model in mind (bmw itself has stated the m3 wagon was a late proposal), the car would need a significant redesign to even meet us regs… then testing after that

I imagine after the reaction to the M3 wagon or probably even just some better platform design synergies new 5 wagon will at least be regulatory compliant to start.

I don't really know anything about how the testing works but one hypothesis I had was that because of the single platform to support a BEV, hybrid, and ice variants there might be more general design commonality between wagon and sedan where less specific testing is necessary making this low volume variant profitable or at least ROI neutral especially when the marketing aspect is factored in (the m3 wagon has gotten a ton of chatter going on it's own despite being ultra low volume)