2025 BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe and i4 EV Double Down on Dumping Buttons

The BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe and BMW i4 are special outliers in BMW's taxonomy, as the two 4 Series models with four doors, rather than two. It's this duo that's getting a glow up for the 2025 model year, in a refresh that improves the M440i's powertrain (yay!) while reducing the number of physical buttons in the cabin (boo!).

On the design front, we're still waiting for BMW to trim the bucktoothed face of its iconic sports sedans, but it looks like that's not going to happen anytime soon. Instead, the automaker is reworking their headlights to make the all-electric 4 Series and Gran Coupe a little sleeker, as well as adding the new «Laserlight» tails on certain models.

The i4 M50 xDrive and M440i will get standard adaptive full-LED headlights, while they'll remain as options on other 4 Series models. Meanwhile, the Laserlights had debuted on the M4 CSL and were later added to the 4 Series Coupe. Now, higher grades of the i4 and Gran Coupe will also get the same rear clusters, which are made by illuminating a fiber optic bundle with laser diodes to create an impossibly thin and flowing effect.

The rest of the exterior will also receive a touch up, but the differences from the outgoing model are mostly skin-deep. The most appreciable changes will be in the lighting elements, as well as inside the cabin, where small but significant tweaks have firmly put BMW in the pro-touchscreen camp. Whereas certain automakers are choosing to go back to buttons, or embrace a healthy mix of the physical as well as digital, BMW says that these new sedans have been «optimized for touch control and natural language,» and bury yet more functions behind the iDrive dial. In fact, the manufacturer specifically calls out in its press release that new, digitally-operated climate controls have enabled a further reduction in the number of physical inputs inside these 4 Series four-doors. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

But a midcycle refresh to the 4 Series would be incomplete without an update to the available powertrains. These updates are similar to the styling changes, yielding but small differences. The 3.0-liter inline-six mild-hybrid setup of the 2025 M440i will now make a total of 386 horsepower