Imagine, if you will, that BMW M has looked at the future, looked at electricity, and instead of quietly accepting it, decided to arrive at Le Mans wearing racing boots and shouting, “Right then, let’s see what you’ve got.”

This is the BMW M Concept Neue Klasse. A glimpse of what the next generation of M cars will look like when petrol fumes have been replaced by electrons moving at improbable speed.

And despite being electric, it still looks every inch an M car. The stance is wide, muscular and slightly annoyed. The front end features a shark nose, yellow racing-inspired headlights and enough aerodynamic trickery to make an aerospace engineer nod approvingly.

Around the back there’s a ducktail spoiler and a diffuser that suggest this thing would quite happily rearrange your internal organs during acceleration.

Inside, BMW hasn’t filled it with gimmicks and giant screens. Instead, it’s focused on driving. There are hardcore bucket seats, racing harnesses, plenty of M-coloured accents and enough performance-minded detail to remind you that this is supposed to go very, very quickly.

And quick it should be. Beneath the dramatic bodywork sits BMW’s new M eDrive system: four electric motors, a battery packing more than 100 kWh, 800-volt architecture and a central computer called the “Heart of Joy”—which sounds less like a vehicle control unit and more like a rejected Eurovision entry.

The clever bit is that the system can control power and braking at each wheel individually, promising the sort of precision and agility that BMW hopes will convince enthusiasts that electric performance cars can still be fun rather than merely fast.

The message from Munich is clear: the future M car won’t simply be an electric BMW. It will be an M car first and an EV second. Whether that convinces die-hard petrolheads remains to be seen, but if this concept is anything to go by, BMW intends to drag its motorsport heritage into the electric age kicking, screaming and travelling at extraordinary speed.

In short: it’s a 1,000-horsepower-looking electric muscle car from the future, unveiled at Le Mans, wearing racing credentials like a medal of honour and determined to prove that the letter M still means mischief.