Bovensiepen has opened the configurator for its first car, the Zagato coupe, at a starting price of €369,495 (435,000 USD). It is a BMW M4 Competition underneath: twin-turbo 3.0-liter inline-six tuned to 602 hp (611 PS), eight-speed automatic, 0-62 mph in 3.3 seconds, titanium Akrapovic exhaust standard. The donor car is the M4 Competition, which German buyers can put in the driveway for €109,600. The Zagato is 3.4 times the price.
You are paying for the bodywork and the exclusivity. Bovensiepen, led by former Alpina chief Andreas Bovensiepen, applies over 400 parts including a full carbon skin to the M4 over the course of 250 hours of labor per car. Only 99 units will be built at the former Alpina headquarters in Buchloe, Germany. Zagato designed the exterior, most notably the signature double-bubble roof that sits atop a heavily modified front fascia, reverse-scooped hood, and wrapped rear-quarter surfaces.
Four M4 Competitions For One Zagato
Three of those cars will not have double-bubble roofs. That is the real trade Bovensiepen is asking you to make. The performance delta over the donor is modest (79 hp and 50 Nm up on an M4 Competition, 0.1 to 0.2 seconds faster to 62 mph), and the chassis engineering is largely carried over from BMW M GmbH. The exhaust note is better because the Akrapovic is better, and the weight is a touch lower thanks to carbon panels, but this is not a car sold on how it goes. It is a car sold on how it looks and how few of them exist.
The visual language is where the money is. Zagato's double-bubble roof is a signature dating back to the 1951 Alfa Romeo 1900 SSZ and it works here because the M4's roofline is squat enough to carry it. The front end is where taste divides: the heavily sculpted nose reads to some people as Chevy Camaro 2019 (which Chevrolet redesigned immediately after launch because buyers hated it) and to others as BMW i8 plug-in hybrid era coupe styling. Your taste on this front treatment will decide whether the Zagato is worth 270,000 EUR of premium over an M4 Competition.
The Cabin Reminds You Which Car Started Here
The optional Lavalina full-leather treatment and the depth of the configurator options go beyond anything BMW offers out of factory, but the underlying architecture is still a 4-Series interior. The dashboard layout, the gauge cluster, the switch placement, the center console, all read as BMW. Bovensiepen could have re-trimmed the cabin top to bottom and rebuilt it around a new center stack. Instead, the investment went into the bodywork. That is a coachbuilder's choice, and for this kind of car it is the defensible one: a bespoke interior would add another 80 to 100,000 EUR to the price and buyers of limited-run coachbuilt cars rarely drive them more than 3,000 km a year.
Bovensiepen is accepting orders now through the online configurator. The 99-unit run is expected to complete deliveries by Q4 2027. At 435,000 USD per car, that is a 43 million USD business on production. If Bovensiepen sells all 99 units at list, the brand is profitable on this model alone.