Quote:
Originally Posted by Longboarder
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unkle Steve
I don't doubt that, but this car would attract more sales if it had a performance variant. This car looks amazing, and subpar looking vehicles (compared to this model) are stealing potential sales from it. Why leave the customer base short handed?
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I don't know this for certain but speculate that the costs would have been dramatically higher to engineer the i8 to safely and adequately handle a lot more power.
There's very few buyers of this car already given the ergonomics - essentially zero cargo space, the difficulty of ingress/egress and limited driver visibility - so an even higher price point would further reduce sales in my opinion. If BMW did increase power with an increase to price to match, then the car would be knocking on the door of cars like Porsche 911 Turbo or GT3, Acura NSX, or possibly the offerings from Lambo, McLaren and Ferrari. Straight up this car would fail miserably in an attempt to compete there.
Plus the point of the car is efficiency at every level and so utilizing a larger internal combustion motor would have been detrimental. |
IMO if it's in any way possible BMW should do something similar to what Tesla did, which was replace the P90D with the P100D and offer the dated model for a spectacular discount.
Then we can have a face lifted i8 with more reasonable performance for the same cost and an i8s model that is meant to compete more with cars like the Audi R8. I'm not stating that the car should be terribly less efficient when it offers the additional performance, but if Tesla can engineer awesome performing cars under 150k, then I fail to see why it can't be done with BMW.
I understand that I'm comparing an electric car to a hybrid, but for the price that the i8 is being sold for (or even a hypothetical 's' variant sold above 200k), it should be able to provide a greater driving experience.