About that photograph
The car at the top of this page does not exist. It is our own rendering, made by taking our photograph of the iX3 and restyling the roof and tail into the coupe shape the second Debrecen car is expected to wear. The front of the car, the wheels, the paint and the road are the real iX3. Everything behind the B pillar is us guessing.
We are saying that here, in the second paragraph, rather than in small type at the bottom, because the whole point of this article is how quickly a guess turns into a fact once it has a picture attached to it.
What BMW actually said
On 18 September 2026, announcing that its Debrecen plant in Hungary has moved to three shifts, BMW said this:
Production of a second, entirely new model from the Neue Klasse will begin at the site this autumn.
That is the whole of it. No name, no bodystyle, no date beyond the season.
Two other figures came with it, and both are more solid than anything being written about the car itself. Plant president Hans-Peter Kemser confirmed the third shift, and BMW stated that in the year since the iX3 premiered, 100,000 customers across Europe have ordered one. Debrecen opened building a single model and is now running around the clock.
What is being reported, and by whom
The story everywhere today is that the second model is an electric SUV coupe, internal codename NA7, to be sold as the iX4, entering the line in November, with a range topped by a quad-motor X4 M making more than 800 hp.
None of that came from BMW. It is assembled from earlier reports, spy photographs of camouflaged prototypes, and the obvious inference that a plant building an iX3 would next build its coupe sibling, because that is what BMW has done with every X3 generation.
We are flagging it rather than repeating it as fact, because the gap between "BMW confirmed a second model" and "BMW confirmed the iX4" is the entire story, and a lot of today's headlines have quietly closed it.
How confident anyone should be
Very confident: a second Neue Klasse model starts production at Debrecen this autumn. BMW said so in its own statement.
Reasonably confident: it is the coupe version of the iX3. Building the two body styles of one car in one plant is how BMW has always done the X3 and X4, the tooling overlap is the reason the plant exists in that configuration, and prototypes matching that description have been photographed.
Not confident at all: the badge. BMW has been rearranging its naming with the Neue Klasse rollout, and "iX4" is the name that follows from the old convention rather than one anybody at BMW has used in public.
Speculation, and nothing more: the quad-motor M car and the 800 hp figure. BMW has shown quad-motor technology and has an M performance version of the Neue Klasse architecture in development, but no output figure for any of it has been confirmed, and numbers that circulate before a reveal are usually somebody's arithmetic rather than somebody's source.
Why it is worth watching anyway
The interesting number today is 100,000. The iX3 took a year to collect that many European orders, in a market where nearly every manufacturer has spent two years explaining that EV demand has softened. A plant going to three shifts is a company that did not expect to need them.
If the second car is the coupe, it arrives into that demand rather than trying to create it, which is a materially different proposition from the last generation of BMW electric cars. And it would mean the Neue Klasse platform is being scaled faster than the public timeline suggested.
We will update this when BMW names the car.
Hero image: Revline Drive speculative rendering, built from our own BMW iX3 photograph. Not a BMW image, and not a real car.
Sources: BMW intensifies production in Hungary amid high iX3 demand (electrive, 18 September 2026); BMW Confirms Next Neue Klasse EV Coming This Fall (BMW Blog, 18 September 2026); BMW iX3 Production Goes 24/7 As A Third Shift Is Added (BMW Blog, 17 September 2026).