BMW i8 - long-term review
Car companies don’t gamble. Except for when they do. Occasionally these conservative corporations run by bean counters forget themselves and something slips through the net. At BMW the net has been particularly holey. I like thinking about cars while I drive them, and what the i8 often makes me think is ‘how the hell did this get signed off?’ I think of the escalating decisions that had to be made, each OK’d by management and finance and still marvel at the fact that BMW got a carbon tubbed, Mini-powered, upswinging-doored, skinny-tyred, plug-in hybrid supercar into mass production. But then you realise the i8 (and the i3 that went hand in hand with it) weren’t BMW's first radical rodeo. It’d been taking punts for a while. The Z8 and Z1 are only part of a back story that includes the M1, 2002 Turbo and Z3 M Coupe. All are driver-focused sports cars, but here I don’t want to talk about…
