As I pull up to the lights on Rodeo Drive with barely a whisper of noise from the eerily silent electric drive, I take a moment to bask in a little smugness. It’s hard not to when almost every other car around is polluting our planet. Not mine. Not this time. Today I’m at the wheel of the world’s first truly environmentally friendly sportscar. As oxymoronic as that may sound, it’s the real deal and I really do like it.
“Hey! You there!”
Oh dear. A balding, moustachioed American wearing an awful Hawaiian shirt is gesticulating from a brand new S-Class stopped alongside me. I hesitate for a moment before lowering my window.
“O-M-G!”
No, did he just speak to me in SMS? Do people actually speak like this?
“What the heck is that thing?” asks my admirer. “Is it fast? How does it drive?”
“It’s the i8, a new BMW hybrid,” I reply, as succinctly as I can.
“It’s frickin’ awesome. How much do you want for it? I’ll buy it from you right now!” he replies with disconcerting directness.
“It’s not for sale. This is a pre-production model and you won’t be able to buy one for another three months,” I reply impudently.
The lights turn green and off we go. Perhaps I was too curt? The poor man may have been as blunt as a hammer but you can’t fault his enthusiasm. Now I feel like an arse.
It’s an odd thing; some cars bring out the best in you, others the worst. I recall the time I was lent an Aston DBS for a weekend and I spent my days gallantly offering rides to all and sundry. But this time, for some reason, the i8 was doing a good job at turning me into the Earl of Snobsdale.
Enough is enough. It’s time to come back to Earth and burn some octanes. I pull the gear lever towards me and shift the car into Sport. Immediately, the instrument panel turns red and I hear a throaty engine kick in from the rear of the vehicle. I stamp on the throttle and the car leaps forward with incredible ferocity. That’s more like it.
I head out of Beverly Hills towards Malibu and return to Santa Monica via the Canyons. It was a great day in the end but now that I’m back from my American adventure, I’m going to try to settle the score with my Hawaiian-shirted friend – let’s call him ‘Chuck’, shall we? – and address each of his points, one by one. Better late than never.
“What the heck is that thing?” was certainly a pertinent question although I’d like to add a few more of my own to Chuck’s opener. What exactly is the purpose of a wing-doored i8? Is there any point to making a hybrid sportscar? Would it not be better to either stick to the goal of speed, or efficiency, rather than compromise the two?
Most experts agree that electric cars will never save our planet and that better, lighter and more efficient solutions must be found but for the moment Toyota/Lexus is enjoying an early lead advantage in the realm of hybrids and Tesla is rewriting the book when it comes to EV’s. BMW must have taken a long, hard look at the situation and realised that it had much to offer here, not the least of which was the idea of making good on its claim of ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ - even if that machine was of the lean and green variety.
This must have been the predominant reason why the Bavarian brand decided to launch an all-new i sub-brand. The i8 and its sibling, the i3, are the first two cars in the stable but there’ll be a lot more to come in the future. And just in case you were wondering, BMW has trademarked i1 through i9.
The new brand's motto is “Born Electric” but different powertrain options will and are already being used. For example, the i3 is fully electric (although you can spec it with a range-extender engine). The i8, by contrast, is a plug-in hybrid. The former is a megacity run-around designed for four adults, the latter a high-performance 2+2 that’ll serve as the halo to the entire range. As different as they may appear, they do share a lot of technology under the skin.
First, is the shared architectural approach of an aluminium chassis combined with a passenger cell made of carbon-fibre. BMW calls it ‘LifeDrive’ architecture and it’s designed to offset a lot of the additional weight from the battery packs. They also share electric motors, lithium-ion batteries and powertrain electronics. And of course, all of them have a unified and specific style with some otherworldly design cues that you’ll learn to associate with the i brand.
“Is it fast?” Chuck had asked me. The i8 manages to find a sweet spot between protecting the Earth and actually having fun on it. It’ll never challenge any of BMW’s M-brand cars at lap times around the Nürburgring but it certainly will beat them when it comes to fuel consumption. It’s no slouch either.
Let me explain how it does this. Under the bonnet you’ll find a big electric motor – the same one as in the i3 – and this is good for 129bhp, all of which is sent to the front wheels. In the rear, there’s a small internal combustion unit – a 1.5-litre three-cylinder unit from the Mini – that has been given a turbocharger as well as a small 13bhp electric motor to help spool up the twin-scroll turbo. Interestingly, the front and rear wheels aren’t actually mechanically connected. The space that’s normally taken up by a drive shaft is instead utilised by the fuel tank as well as the battery pack that’s powerful enough to drive the car up to 120km/h, all on its own. Electronic wizardry is what links the four wheels, allowing them to work simultaneously with a peak output of 357bhp.
BMW claims that zero to 100km/h can be achieved in 4.4 seconds with an electronically limited 250km/h top speed. Clearly, this is no Prius. Far from it. But it’s also not some kind of dual-drive million-dollar hypercar like the Porsche 918 Spyder, Ferrari’s LaFerrari or McLaren P1.
The i8 isn’t meant to be fastest nor the most economical car in the world but it is meant to do both sufficiently well that it springs a technological and social change. It’s a tall order and it’s never easy being a standard-bearer but the good news is that you can tip the balance in either direction by playing with the car’s three modes: EcoPro, Comfort and Sport. The first is the most conservative and it goes so far as to limit how much power is drawn by functions like air-conditioning. For pure electric driving, you can hit the eDrive button just below the starter and this gives you about 37 kilometres of range. Comfort mode is the default setting. It starts you off on electric power and only brings in the petrol engine if and when it’s needed. The last mode – Sport – should be thought of as Fun mode. It’s almost like playing a video game because as soon as you pull on the gear lever, the instruments go red, the steering quickens, the adaptive suspension tightens, the transmission shifts become manual and all the motors, whether electric or petrol, are readied and able to give you their all.
There’s one more thing. During early i8 testing, there was a lot of criticism regarding the nasty sounds produced by the weedy three-cylinder Mini engine. To fix this, BMW has piped the engine's sonic whirs into the cabin in a way the company calls “augmented”. Basically, BMW pre-recorded the i8's best sounds, remixed them and sent them back to you via the speaker system. (It doesn’t make any difference if you’ve got music playing or not). As soon as I was told about this I was horrified and I bet you are too. But as much as I wanted to hate it, I didn’t. And to be honest if BMW hadn’t come clean and admitted it, I’m sure I’d never have noticed the sound wasn’t real. Even so, I felt compelled to ask Dr. Carsten Breitfeld, head of the BMW i project, if I could download a V12 sound upgrade one day. “Of course not, that would be fake,” he told me, oblivious to the irony of his words. “The truth of the matter is that sonically, there’s no big difference between a three cylinder and a six-cylinder engine. So this engine sounds good. All we did was amplify it.”
Moving on, then. “How does it drive?” Well, Chuck, switching on the car is simply a question of pressing the starter button and waiting for the dashboard to light up. From that point, all you need to do is put the car in gear and off you go. That’s because in town, the car prefers to stay in electric mode and this is precisely what I enjoyed so much as I made my way around Beverly Hills. The throttle response, agility and unnerving silence are only spoiled by the sound of tyres on tarmac.
The i8 is a very low car. With a centre of gravity just 46 centimetres above the road – lower than any other BMW model – it naturally corners flat and fast. Luckily, despite large wheels, thin tyres and a hard suspension, the ride is still supple enough to make potholes an irrelevance.
On the Pacific Coast Highway, the engine kicks in, almost imperceptibly and cruising, even at speed, is a cinch. Veer off onto the windy canyon roads and you’ll want to be in Sport, especially if you want to test the i8’s neutral handling. Push hard and you will discover some limit understeer but in most cases, the car will go wherever you point it. Is it perfect, Chuck? No, but neither was that shirt. Oh dear. It’s happening again.
Back to the matter at hand. If I had to find more gripes I would say that even though the steering is well-weighted – especially in Sport – I did crave more feedback and this is exacerbated by the lack of front-end bite when you’re really going for it. The fuel-efficient thin tyres don’t help matters and while they don’t relinquish grip easily they certainly do screech when you push them hard. Some other complaints would be that the brakes lack urgency even though they balance energy regeneration and friction stopping very well. There’s the issue of getting in and out of the car bum first over those wide buttresses, which I’m sure will be a major complaint for women and the elderly. And lastly, there’s the fact that the cabin has a surprising lack of headroom. I could fit without too much of a problem but there wasn’t much excess space.
“How much is it?” The i8 costs 136,000 USD in North America, 635,000 AED in Dubai. That means it fits between a Carrera 4S and a Turbo in terms of value. For one of the most complicated consumer products on the market today, with a roster of innovations longer than I can possibly list in a single article, I’d say that this is great value for money. Not only does the i8 look gorgeous, it’s a landmark that will change the way people view sportscars. It’s amazing to think that petrolheads will now be able to do their bit to save the environment. It may not be the Ultimate Driving Machine but BMW will go down in history as the first automaker to have made the electric car sexy. That’s a hell of an achievement.
