Here’s Why The BMW i8 Flopped

this BMW I8 had all of the ingredients to make it a runaway success but ultimately the recipe and putting it all together just didn't work just by the looks of this car you'd never guess that this wasn't the top of some bestseller list of all-time great supercars in this video I'll tell you about all of the reasons why I think this car ultimately was a flop these doors are really cool looking but to get in and out you have to be an Olympic gymnast and I keep hitting my head on this thing every time I try to get in and then once you're in this part is so big that you need additional athletic abilities just to be able to get out and look how high up this is I'm using it as an armrest I guess you could use this as a bench BMW completely forgot about how this thing was actually going to work with people and just focused on the style and design looks are important but also spend some time thinking thinking about the usability of it you know what's insane about this I8 you can't even open this Hood there's no normal hood release latch BMW basically made it impossible to open up the hood normally they have a couple of cable release latches that are hidden behind these panels you need screwdrivers and then you need two people to open up the hood that's just crazy the gasoline engine is not under the hood but still I want to see what's in there so why not make it easy the front has the electric motor and the gasoline engine is back here and even this is hard to get to you have to lift up this cover and then you have to unscrew all of this just to be able to get to it so if you're a do-it-yourself person and you want to work on your I8 just add an extra 30 hours to your labor time I have it Theory I think the reason why BMW made it so complicated is because they wanted all the cars to come into their service shop and make extra money just because of how much it cost them to build this I can't imagine BMW made any money on these cars cuz just these doors must be crazy expensive to put together and that's why they probably had to shut down production in 2020 after a six-year run cuz if you think about the BMW lineup this had to have its own special Factory and mechanism because this car is the only one of its kind none of the other BMWs need any kind of this complicated manufacturing process so this car back in 2015 cost somewhere around $140,000 which is Supercar pricing territory and on the outside it looks like one the inside though is a different story it's not that the inside's bad it's just too much like a standard BMW from that era if you look look at my other video which I'll link to in the description you'll know what I mean there's some differences for sure but it's just too plain and doesn't scream exotic when you get inside there's also some cheap plastic on the dash too so there's some areas where you could tell that BMW Cuts some Corners I guess when you spend a lot of dollars trying to manufacture doors like this you got to go cheap somewhere else one of the most ridic ridiculous aspects of this I8 are the back seats which I have no idea why they even exist with the seat pushed back all the way you could fit a hand in here to leave any kind of room for your passenger in the back seat you have to push your front seat up pretty far so only a small person could fit up front so now if you want to get in the back and you try to push the front seat back down it scrapes up against the front visor this really is an awful design if you somehow manage manage to squeeze yourself back in these seats not only are you sitting straight up you put the seat back and you just want to die and they have CB holders back here which is completely ridiculous I mean this whole back area is just ridiculous I actually have no idea how this horrible terrible design ever made it to production that just doesn't even make any sense pretend that the back seats aren't even there because this car doesn't really need them ultimately this car is a series of failed compromises because this thing had to be fuel efficient environmentally friendly they couldn't make it that fast a tiny 1.5 L Mini Engine paired up with an electric motor it's still quick with 420 lb feet of torque but not nearly fast enough to be competitive in its category when you have a car that looks like this you expect it to be faster it's not even about just the speed the electric motor by itself only has 20 M of range so you can barely drive it anywhere with that range just in electric mode and I've noticed that even in that range it dips down so quickly when you're just in electric mode so what you have here is a car that could be faster but isn't you have an electric motor that barely has any range and your gas mileage is not as high as it could be considering that this is supposed to be a hyper environmentally friendly car and do you know what the czy easy thing is you have to constantly drive this in sport mode to charge the battery which means you're draining the fuel even more and the more aggressively and the harder you drive it the more the battery gets charged which is completely counterintuitive that's a completely nonsensical setup because look how beautiful the car is another compromise they had to make really skinny tires 2115 up front 245 in the back I'm surprised that the skinny tires don't really impact handling though this car actually handles pretty great despite all of this car's shortcomings and flaws I still really like it though I love things that are weird and unique and the fact that it looks so great it's a shame that this car didn't become a huge success and you know what's really ironic about this whole thing the car that exactly looks like a concept car stayed pretty much that a concept

Channel: Infinite Shifts

Views: 31,931

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Id: KB86UN1hbFo

Length: 6min 29sec (389 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023