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.