If you’re looking for the cattiest reporting on fuel economy regulation, you’ve come to the right place. This is the Morning Shift for August 15, 2018.

Last year’s introduction of the all-new BMW 5 Series left the outgoing M5 in the dust with the M550i xDrive model, powered by a 4.4-liter V8 with 455 horsepower. Bad news for last-gen M5 owners is that the 2020 M550i is going to get even more power, which means it will be even quicker.

Earlier in June, Jalopnik was able to scoop up some patent photos from Autoweek that were rumored to show the 2019 BMW Z4 way before anyone officially decided to say anything. We’ve been living in shades of gray since then, wondering exactly what the real Z4 is going to look like in the flesh.

Marc Rooding, Dutch owner of a F30 BMW 320i, awoke just before 4 a.m. a week ago to the local police knocking on his door, who explained to him they had been alerted by a car security call center that somebody had smashed the passenger-side window on his car. And it only got weirder from there.

No, the new, 2019 BMW i8 isn’t terribly different from the first one. It now has a longer electric range and a little extra power, but it’s still the same idea: A hybrid powertrain that you can drive in an all-electric mode. Also, who cares, because this thing looks freaking incredible. What do you want to know about…

This is what a car interior should look like: no screen to distract me, manual transmission, car phone for all my phone calls.

In 1987, BMW announced to the world that it was officially not screwing around anymore when it put a 5.0-liter V12 into production, setting a 300-horsepower standard for luxury and refinement. It was only a few years later that BMW would produce probably the ultimate V12, the 618-horsepower heart of the McLaren F1.…

The McLaren F1, also known as The Gold Standard By Which All Other Cars Are Measured, famously has 627 horsepower raging out of its naturally-aspirated BMW V12. For the turbo BMW V8 in the new 2019 BMW M5 Competition, it has slightly fewer horsepower. In fact, just two fewer horsepower. It has 625 horsepower.

The BMW E46 M3, with its 333 horsepower, timeless styling, and wailing straight-six, remains the eternal “Best M3,” the people’s champ. But how much would you really pay for one new today?

“This is one bad bitch,” the valet said as he pulled the Marina Bay Blue 2018 BMW M5 out of the bowels of the parking garage on Manhattan’s West Side for me.

When it comes to things people want in their cars, a fire is pretty far down the list, and that’s true for pretty much anywhere in the world, including South Korea. This is bad news for South Korean owners of BMW diesels, which have been catching fire at an alarming rate: 11 caught fire in July alone, and since the…

My search for the best driving roads in Japan hasn’t gone quite as well as I had hoped. So far the biggest problem I’ve faced was traffic getting to the roads themselves. When I went to the Hakone Turnpike in the MX-5 Miata RF it was raining, but that’s not really a deal breaker as it was quite fun in the wet. Going…

BMW, being German, keeps a historical archive. Luckily for me, it’s searchable, so you can go look up your favorite Z3 brochure or whatever. I decided to see what would come up if I just typed in “drift.” As it turned out, solid gold hits.

I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, that doesn’t look bad at all!” Trust me, I thought the same thing.

A billion dollars going to a new manufacturing plant, 700 million losing out to tariffs and more await you on The Morning Shift for Tuesday, July 31, 2018.

The car tariffs are starting to hit consumers, FCA’s new CEO has some very large shoes to fill and the trucking industry’s attempts at attracting new drivers await your rapt attention on The Morning Shift for Monday, July 30, 2018.

I hear you engineers out there, yelling about how automatics are faster and better at shifting than us mortals. But, as we’ve explained time and time again, they don’t make driving much fun. Thankfully, BMW says that it will keep putting manuals in its cars. As long as we buy them, of course.

It’s too big, it’s too soft, it’s not special enough. The E36 M3 is everyone’s go-to for the worst of the right-sized M cars, practical and powerful in equal measure. But the reality of the thing is different.

The 2018 BMW M5 is an utter sledgehammer of a car. When you push the throttle, it doesn’t just accelerate, it seizes you by your lower jaw and rips you, screaming, through the cosmos. It’s really quite pleasant. A cure for old age, I daresay.

BMW is a V8-heavy company today, with twin-turbo versions filling up just about every big-power model it has on sale. It’s hard to even remember when they were completely alien to the Bavarians, and how it broke back into the world of eights with a compact 3.0-liter, flawed from the start.