The first time a car gave me this exact feeling, it was a Porsche Panamera.
Not because they look alike. Because both cars break the same rule. Something this large, this luxurious, with this much boot and this much back seat, has no right to be this savage. You sit in what is clearly a comfortable family SUV, you press the accelerator, and the laws you thought applied to comfortable family SUVs stop applying.
IM will be a new name to most people reading this. It's the premium brand from SAIC, the giant behind MG, sold here by Eurokars, and the IM6 is its SUV. The Performance is the top of the range: two motors, 767 hp, 802 Nm, and 0 to 100 in 3.48 seconds.
That last number undersells it. Numbers usually do.
The savage bit
I've driven fast EVs. This is something else.
One evening I had to merge onto the expressway quickly. I drive a fast car daily, so I gave it what I judged to be the right amount of throttle. It was not the right amount. The IM6 didn't merge into the gap so much as teleport past it, and I spent the next two seconds recalibrating what my right foot means in this car.
Full throttle in this thing feels genuinely hostile, the kind of acceleration that makes passengers go quiet and then start laughing. You feel like you're holding back something feral. Except the something has massage seats.
Here's the honest caveat, and I share it with almost every reviewer who has driven this car hard: the IM6 is a straight-line weapon, not a corner one. Push into a tight bend and 2.4 tonnes politely declines. The four-wheel steering that makes it brilliant in carparks can make quick direction changes feel odd at first, because the car rotates more than your hands expect. I got used to it within a couple of days, but the first hairpin will surprise you.
The brake pedal could be more reassuringly weighted too, a common note on brake-by-wire systems, though stopping smoothly is never a problem.
Around town, none of that matters. What matters is the air suspension, which is Performance-only and worth having. The ride is genuinely plush. Combined with the double-glazed glass all round, this is one of the quietest cabins I've experienced at expressway speeds. A proper grand tourer. I'd take this on a long road trip tomorrow, and I mean a Malaysia-long one, not an ECP-long one.
Most of the week it is a limousine. It takes about three seconds to remind you it isn't.
A cabin above its badge
The seats deserve their own paragraph, so here it is. Ventilated, massaging, and shaped like someone actually studied a human spine. These are honestly among the most comfortable seats I've had in any car, at any price. The back row keeps the theme: quilted, generous legroom, adjustable backrests.
Soft materials everywhere, real attention in the wood-look panelling, and a 20-speaker sound system, four of them in the roof, fitted as standard. The tuning could be tighter, but switch it to the panoramic setting and it turns the cabin into a small concert hall. Bass-heavy and electronic music in particular sound stellar.
The boot is huge at 646 litres, wide-mouthed and easy to load, plus a 32-litre frunk, which is just alright, but nice to have. This car wasn't designed as a family SUV, but it could absolutely do the job.
Now the gripes, because there are real ones.
The sunroof is a fixed panoramic panel with no blind. IM says the glass is double-glazed and thermally insulating. On a hot Singapore afternoon, the cabin still warms up noticeably more than it should. In this climate, that's not a small thing.
There's no glove box. Cabin storage overall is fine rather than good.
And the steering wheel, which I'll get to, because it belongs in the next section.
The screen does everything
Almost everything in this car lives on the 26.3-inch main display or the 10.5-inch tablet below it. The air vents are touch-controlled. The buttons that survive on the steering wheel have no symbols on them, none, so you learn volume and cruise control by trial and error. The cruise controls themselves sit on paddle-like stalks behind the wheel where you can't see them. It takes real acclimatising, and the time I spent with the car wasn't quite enough to stop hunting through menus.
The saving grace is the voice system, which is genuinely good. I used it for climate, for regen settings, for things I'd never trust a car's voice assistant with. It works.
We made a version of this complaint about the Volvo EX30, which routes nearly everything through one screen. The IM6 goes further, because there are two of them, and the air vents live on the lower one.
And then there are the moments when all that screen earns its keep. The blind spot monitor is my favourite: when a car sits in your blind spot, a red accent glows at the left or right edge of that huge panel, right in your peripheral vision, exactly where a warning should live. Signal left or right and a crisp camera window pops up on the driver's side of the display with the view down that flank. This is some of the best camera integration I've seen in any car, and unlike some rivals it doesn't hijack the whole screen to do it.
Worth noting: overseas reviews of early cars complained about a chorus of nagging chimes from the driver aids. Our car had none of that. Everything was calm, and everything was customisable, which suggests IM has been shipping fixes over the air. Good sign for a software-first brand.
The startup theatre is silly and I love it. Big, bassy, Hans Zimmer-style score, a red IM6 sweeping across the widescreen. Day one it's a delight. Day seven, still a delight. I never skipped it once.
Living with it in Singapore
Over a week of normal driving, aircon working hard, the trip computer read 22.1 kWh per 100 km. Here's the surprising part: that's better than IM's own claimed figure of 23.4. Cars almost never beat their official consumption numbers in the real world, let alone a 767 hp SUV in this heat.
In range terms, that works out to roughly 440 km on a full charge, against 505 claimed, and a comfortable 350-ish if you keep the NMC battery at 80% day to day. More than enough for how anyone actually drives here.
For context, the smart #5 Pro managed 17.2 kWh/100km on the same roads, and it has less than half the power of this thing.
Charging is a headline act on paper: 800V architecture, up to 396 kW DC, 10 to 80% in 18 minutes. The catch is finding a Singapore charger that can feed it anything close to that. On the chargers that exist here today, it's merely quick rather than miraculous. AC is capped at 11 kW, which is fine.
Carparks are where this near-4.9-metre car should be a chore, and isn't. The four-wheel steering gives it a turning circle that shames cars two sizes smaller. And the self-parking suite, which IM calls One Touch iAD, is the best-integrated I've used: one touch to find and take a lot, one touch for kerbside parallel parking, one touch to pull out of a tight spot. There's even a function that records your path down a narrow lane and reverses you back out along it, up to 100 metres. None of it feels like a demo. It feels like a feature you'd actually lean on weekly.
There's a crab mode too. You will use it once, to show a friend.
Orange Continental brake calipers as standard. Silly. Love them.
Which IM6 should you buy
Honest answer: probably not this one.
The Performance costs S$346,888 with COE. The single-motor Luxury is a Cat A car, a full S$100,000 cheaper, with the same cabin, the same screens, the same 20 speakers, the same seats. What you give up is the air suspension, the second motor, and the violence.
If the violence is the point, nothing at this price does it better. Worth knowing where that price sits: the BMW iX3, the highest score we have given anything, is only about S$40,000 further up. If the violence isn't the point, the Luxury is the sensible buy, and we'd like to test one.
You can line the IM6 up against the rest of the market in our compare tool.
Whichever variant, the ownership package is generous: ten years of battery warranty, ten years of free servicing, ten years of free in-car data. For a brand this new, that's Eurokars putting real money behind the badge.
The verdict
The IM6 Performance is two cars. Most of the time it's a quiet, soft, beautifully finished grand tourer with world-class seats and clever cameras. Ask, and it becomes the most brutal accelerating thing we have ever tested.
The screen needs a rethink at the edges. The wheel needs labels. The roof needs a blind. None of it stops this being the most complete surprise of our year so far.
A year ago you hadn't heard of IM. On this evidence, you will.