It’s not often that we run spy photos of cars from marques other than Audi. Yes, you’ll see the occasional Porsche Macan that shares a platform with the Audi Q5, but for us to show a BMW is surprisingly out of sorts. There’s got to be a reason and it appears one of our spy photographer sources gave us reason enough today.

What you see here are shots of the upcoming BMW 4-series coupe. “4-series” is the new designation for the coupe version of the 2-door BMW 3-series. If that sounds just a bit similar to Audi’s own staggered A4/A5 sedan/coupe nomenclature designation then maybe it’s no surprise that they appear to have a brand new A5 out on cold weather testing rounds with this camouflaged coupe test mule.

The note from our sources say they caught the cars parked next to each other outside a frequent lunch haunt of engineers in cold weather testing areas. Perhaps it is a coincidence but judging by the BMWs all parked on either side of these two black coupes, we’re guessing otherwise. Also, if you were BMW and were going to benchmark your new coupe’s cold weather performance on ice and snow against a car, wouldn’t you choose a quattro?

See more photos of the 4-series test mule and the black A5 via our photo gallery linked below and to the right.