I think there's a lot of insight in this comment. I also believe a lot of customers (current and potential) would really like to buy an EV from an established car maker rather than a new comer, and I believe they really want it to look and feel just like a 3-series, or 5-series, or whatever they're called – not the abomination that is i3. I believe this is what everyone except Tesla understands, and I really don't know but maybe it's exactly for the reasons you lay out: they don't want to cannibalize on the gas guzzler series. But if they don't eat themselves, someone else sure will!

My abomination i3 is the best car I’ve ever owned. To each there own, I personally think it looks like it came out of Blade Runner and the only real complaint I have is I wish it were AWD and had wider, less bicycle-like tires.

Just to be clear, I do think the i3 and cars like them have a place in the market, and kudos to BMW for getting outside of its comfort zone and shipping something new that has found an audience.

However, if I were running BMW (and it's surely best for everyone that I'm not), I wouldn't want the i3 to be the core of my EV business. The day-to-day bread-and-butter EVs should target the same demographic sweet spots as BMW's gas guzzlers: expensive but not too expensive, comfortable, attractive, high-performance vehicles with (at least perceived) consistently high quality for components, engineering, innovation, and some combination of classy design and sporty sexiness.

People can argue whether or not they've ever consistently nailed all or any of those marks, but at the very least, that is the niche that BMW aspires to be in in the auto industry, and the niche it has had the most success in occupying. BMW has had great success making a certain type of motorcycle and certain types of cars, and I've got to think they'd have great success making a certain type of EV if they fearlessly applied themselves to doing it. Maybe they've realized their mistakes and are doing that now, who knows, but they're years behind where I wish they were. :( I still think they can catch up as long as they've at least gotten their vision together by now.

I’m sure it’s a great car but man it looks terrible, and I’m willing to bet a lot of consumers are just as vain as I am. It is of course just my opinion, and as you say: to each their own. I’m glad you like your car, but if I was to buy an EV I want it to look like a regular car – not like something out of blade runner.

Personally, it looks great if you think man-made stuff should look man-made.

Since we're playing this game, the BMW i3 looks bad to me.

Of course not everything "interesting and/or unusual" is good design, but in this case I think it holds.

> I wish it (had) less bicycle-like tires.

Agree completely. I absolutely love the i3 (especially the futuristic design, and the rex engineering), and was going to try to get one at some point -- until I discovered the bicycle tires.

I'm not sure it's even safe to drive on US roads with tires like that. Did BMW forget that potholes are a thing?

Traded in my AMG-variant Mercedes for an i3 almost five years ago, and, while I miss the Mercedes, which was far more sure footed than any BMW i've known (probably courtesy of AMG), the i3 is a great entirely weird nerdmobile. And its tail end opens like the back of a cargo plane...just weird and useful.

Tires cost a fortune because they're annoyingly thin, so wear down fast, and only are made by Bridgestone, I think. Handling is great: carbon fiber and alumin[i]um.

My bro-in-law had one and liked it, then moved to Nebraska. First snowfall they had to get rid of it - it was terrible on anything slippery.

Then he had the wrong tires, guaranteed.

Exactly - bicycle tires.

Perhaps the parent meant to suggest https://www.bmwblog.com/2015/04/04/bmw-i3-winter-tires-revie... for the winter. At least according to that review, using the winter tires would have been better in the snow.

Of course if you’d rather run all-weather tires without the hassle of changing from summer to winter tires, it seems like the i3 is a bad choice.

The 19" tire is "All Season" rated. The 20" performance tire is "Summer Only." So if you want an i3 "without the hassle" you simply get one with the more-common 19" wheels.

Yep. I rock all season tires on my (not an i3) car as well. They’ll never be great in the snow, but I live in an area where snow is rare so that’s fine.

I can certainly imagine the “bicycle” tires must not be very good at all in the snow unless they’re the specialized winter version!

My mechanic said the cost of tire replacements is nuts on them.

$180 apiece. (our i3 has the 19" wheels. No idea what the 20" go for) Some Costcos stock them, ours had to order and it arrived next day.

I'd expect this cost is in the ballpark for their other cars.

I can't provide a source right now, maybe Matt Farah, but I've always heard i3s are of extremely high quality. Perhaps people like to project their range anxiety onto the rest of the vehicle?

I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s not so much the quality that puts me off, it’s the appearance. I personally think it’s ugly and there’s way too much “noise” in its aesthetics, for lack of a better term. But as the previous commenter said, to each their own. I’m sure it’s a fine car. It’s just not the aesthetic I’d go for, especially as far as BMWs go.

It really is. The entire body is carbon fiber. We had a major hailstorm about a year back and it trashed everyone's car except mine at my office. No damage. I also had a joker run a light and clip my left-rear quarter panel - moving me about 1.5 feet in the process - also no damage.

I'm actually leasing mine and plan on buying one used. You can find them for sub-25k and quite honestly it's one of the best values EV-wise you can find.

Yes that's the problem with electrics, even when they try to make them unappealing people still love them.

Is electric AWD more like a low-end AWD (like Haldex) or can it actually compete with quattro?

With fully independent powertrains for both alxes (and potentially, for each of four wheels), electric AWD is potentially better that anything that mechanical AWD can offer.

I say "potentially" because one can always screw it up with bad (or poorly tuned) software.

>everyone except Tesla understands

Why do you claim this?

Tesla cannot change the fact that they are a newcomer. They can only stand by their vehicles as best they can (which has been difficult for body work, but most mechanical issues can be handled efficiently).

Furthermore, the look of Tesla vehicles is 100% optimized for drag efficiency. Most electric car purchasers care about range a lot more than look...

> Why do you claim this?

Because they are the only manufacturer of EVs that look and feel mostly like regular cars. It's really that simple. Also, please don't miss the "I believe" part of my statement, I have zero facts to back this up, it's just my opinion.

> Furthermore, the look of Tesla vehicles is 100% optimized for drag efficiency.

Who cares? I want my car to be 100% optimized for not looking like a deranged design experiment. I want it to look like all the other cars. I, just like most other people, aren't special and don't really care to look that way either.

>Because they are the only manufacturer of EVs that look and feel mostly like regular cars.

Did you mean to write "nobody except Tesla understands" in your previous comment? This reads like you've accidentally trash talked them while trying to praise them, and now you're in a weird disagreement with someone you kind of agree with.

Yes, of course! I didn't even realize my mistake, and now it's too late to change. Thanks for the correction, and my apologies for the confusion.

Jaguar makes iPace model now that can compete with Tesla on looks and even beat it on UX

I don’t think you can actually buy them. Or the wait is over a year.

In Europe you can buy it straight from the dealership. It's been available for almost a year.

at what price though?

Starts at $70k apparently, about the same as the Model S starting price (though obviously much higher than the Model 3 or, likely, Model Y)

I thought the model 3 was basically 60k if you put in minimal accessories. How do they compare on that?

Model 3 now starts at 39500 with Autopilot.

60k will get you the Performance Model with 0-60 in 3.2s and 11.6 1/4 mile

> I want it to look like all the other cars.

So buy a LEAF (which looks just like a Prius) or buy a Bolt (which looks just like a Spark) or an Outlander EV (which is almost identical to a regular Outlander) or an Ioniq (which looks like an Elantra) or a Kona EV (which is almost identical to a regular Kona SUV).

There are plenty of electric cars that look like traditional boring cars, if that's really the only thing holding you back.

> So buy a LEAF (which looks just like a Prius)

The new one does. The old one is as different as it can be.

isnt Hyundai competitive now, and they look like cars?

Yes, but there is no real production so you can’t get one.

Completely agree with you there, both the i8 and the i3 in my opinion look like electric vehicles you'd read about in a sci-fi novel, but neither are cool or sexy.

Honestly the world needs more unique-looking cars. Every 4-door sedan made after 2000 or so looks like the same boring identical “bar of soap with wheels”. With only a few minor differences (headlight and tail light shape, grill, etc. from a large distance only car experts tell any of the major brands apart visually.

I'm old enough to remember (although I didn't particularly notice it at the time) when headlights were standardized. In fact, I've got a car from the 80s right now, and the (pop-up) headlights are round and say "Sylvania".

I don't think that the diversity of headlights is an exception to the rule of cars all looking the same, but rather one instance out of many of designers having far more freedom than they did historically, and so there's a lot more variation in what they produce.

Fewer and fewer people are buying sedans, but it's easy to pick a couple to contrast. Take the Ford Fusion and Taurus. The Fusion is all ovals, while the Taurus seems to be made out of chamfered blocks and trapezoids. Or consider the previous generation Hyundai Sonata. The current one is generic looking, I would agree, but the one sold from 2010-2014 looked like no other sedan that I've seen.

I remember when Kia and Hyundai were known as cheap Korean cars, whoever is in charge of branding has really done a great job turning things around. I especially love the look of the 2019 genesis and the Kia stinger is quite interesting, it feels very American in a way I can't describe when I see one on the road.

Kia Stinger looks American, in my opinion, due to the vents forward and aft of the front wheels; tall blunt nose, high rear with short rear window.

It looks a bit like a Mustang.

I just read that the designer of the stinger was previously designing for Audi, I can see a pretty similar resemblance to the a7 in the rear.

And engineering. I used to think the long warranty was just because it was guaranteed to break, but having gone a decade with friends going through their entire life cycles they’re very sturdy cars. Definitely giving Honda a run for the money.

Oh come now, the industry gives you both kinds of design: “Two box” and “Three box!”

I decided on an i8 over the Tesla model S. The driving experience and the interior quality of the i8 was, IMO, superior. It was a close call mind you. I even put down a 4K deposit on the Tesla.

I felt the i8 was an £80k car with £30k of tech, whereas the Tesla was a £30k car with £80k tech.

As an unexpected bonus, my pregnant wife found it easier to get in and out the i8 compared to standard cars entries :)

You will be out of seats soon...

It's not an abomination it has some flaws which don't affect me, others that make me compromise a bit (drive more slowly, stop more often), but some reasons I chose it other than it being the only affordable electric car available that met all my requirements, was because of the bmw quality and attention to detail which are also hallmarks of the brand.

The 3-series and 5-series have had electric options (330e & 550e) for some time now.

They both are hybrids so don’t even fall under the same category as electric cars for most people.

The bmw website doesn’t even show options for 330e so that seems to be discontinued and for the 530e the electric range is 16 miles, so basically a luxury Prius.

Not sure where the 330e went, but there's going to be a 2020 hybrid X1.

I don't know where you're based, but I wonder if that's a US perspective? I've been driving a PHEV in the UK for 5 years, and perhaps 50% of my colleagues with EVs also have hybrids (including a couple with the 330e); I've never known anyone say they're not electric cars before.

The 330e is still available on the BMW UK website.

Yeah I don't really consider hybrids EVs to be honest. I want to get off fossil fuels, not have a token battery that barely gets me out of the driveway.

If 90 percent of your battery is used to cover the 5% of your travels that a PHEV's battery doesn't cover, it seems like it could potentially be more wasteful to own a BEV.

(I checked and it seems that a Tesla model 3 does indeed have a battery on the order of ten times the capacity of, say, a Prius Prime)

My token battery gets me to work 20 miles away, and I rarely fire up the ICE, but it means that I can still drive from London to Scotland with only a single stop for petrol.

How is this an achievement? I drove from London to Edinburgh with no stops for fuel in a diesel car. Hybrid presumably should do better.

You left out the part about where they use zero fossil fuels for their daily commute.

Unfortunately you can't get off fossil fuels by buying a car - they contain embedded energy of which a large percentage comes from fossil fuels.

If the lifetime of a vehicle is say 400000 kms, I calculate that a new Prius emits less CO2 than a new Model S if manufacturing etc is included.

It highly depends on energy mix that Model S uses (ie. compare Quebec to Ontario): http://www.neb-one.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/snpsht/2018/09-01-1...

embedded energy (production) for EV is higher but not that much higher https://blog.ucsusa.org/rachael-nealer/gasoline-vs-electric-...

From that blog: "Driving an average EV results in lower global warming emissions than driving a gasoline car that gets 50 miles per gallon (MPG)".

A Prius gets approx 50 MPG!

We’re in a transition phase, so hybrids are a practical solution for a lot of people. A “token” battery is useful to a lot of people. Especially those living in the city. Electric charge points aren’t abundant just yet.

> Electric charge points aren’t abundant just yet.

Every wall socket is a charge point, and most people have dozens of those around their house. They're surely more abundant than petrol stations.

240 V 50 A dryer outlets are said to work pretty well, if you happen to own a house. Normal 15 A appliance outlets barely work (Tesla says one hour per three miles!) and no apartment building has ever offered me a parking space that had one.

I wouldn't buy a pure-electric until nearly all apartments have charging, and that work has barely started.

Just to clarify, I was talking about inner city. Most existing apartment blocks (in London) don’t have charge points available in their car park.

On top of that, I find public charging points to be hit and miss. Quite often you find ICE only cars taking the space or the charging points just out of service/neglected.

I do look forward to the day when electric charging networks are available everywhere with rapid charging.

A lot of people in cities don't have "their house" and don't want to hang a 50m cable out of their window.

“Around their house”- key point when youre not near home.

Those are plugin hybrids with pretty anemic all-electric range.

What electric range do they have? 1 mile? 30?

It is not just the market, it is the people and infrastructure too.

Think about that for a moment, you are trained as a mechanical engineer. You know about motors, transmissions and all the complexity involved in creating a combustion engine car, like handling fluids, pumps and so on.

Now, you are going to take a decision that destroys engines, your new cars are not going to have engines. Transmissions are extremely simple or do not exist. The entire car does not need to resist the forces of the engine and transmission. No pumps and brakes last the entire life of the car.

This means mechanical engineers are not needed, and you already have them. Under German law, it is extremely difficult to let them go, and they are your pals,btw.

The infrastructure of cars is extremely expensive, several 1000s millions of dollars per plant. This is amortized in decades. If you buy a thousand lathes that make pieces for 20 years and after 10 years demand for those pieces disappear... your lathes cost at least double.

But the most important thing: Germany is good making mechanical things, but not the leader in batteries or electronics, Japan, US, Taiwan and China are.

Electric cars still require mechanical engineers, and probably a similar number of them to an IC car. Except for the engine itself, most things are not engineered in-house, suppliers like Bosch/ZF/etc provide components to specs.

Most car companies today are really engine companies. They stamp and weld the bodies and build the engines and everything else is out sourced. EVERYTHING ELSE! So the original commenter is correct they would have to lay off half their people to convert to electric motors.

In what business is the opportunity to reduce payroll a disincentive to investment? At worst they can be paid to retire.

It sounds almost as if you are arguing that BMW does not want to invest heavily in EV because the cost of labor is not high enough. That's absurd. The logical conclusion is that they should pay them to retire.

I think we are reading too much into the EV aspect of the story. At the end of the day it is all about making money. BMW are not so good at that these days. China has not been the gravy train that it looked to be and the anticipated sales growth in the world's largest car market has failed to materialise. Sad considering the lengths that BMW have gone to with the big nostrils on their models.

BMW fans still like the product however fast, rear-wheel drive saloon cars are a dying segment of the market. The once invincible three series is just not as common on the roads as it used to be.

Making SUV models in North America is a good idea for Americans insatiable desire to buy European brand vehicles and Americans desires to buy SUVs. But, no offence to American labour or supply chains, it is a bit of a final assembly screwdriver operation. The engines and plenty else comes from Germany. Some components did make it over to South Carolina but you can't say the plant is a charitable effort to hire U.S. workers or a means of tapping into U.S. automotive worker skills, it is a money making machine that gets around tariffs, Chicken Tax or not.

BMW EV cars are not strictly about being EV. The electric bits come from Bosch, the same Bosch that supply every other EV maker apart from Tesla. You just buy those bits.

What BMW did and is quite commendable is carbon fibre. They are the only mass market manufacturer making passenger cells in carbon fibre. They went into it big time with the i3 and i8.

What is also interesting about BMW is how they are owned. Most auto manufacturers are owned by the banks. They don't really own their stuff any more than a mortgage owner owns their own house. They are paying interest. To the banks. BMW are different, they own all their own stuff and don't owe the banks. This is quite admirable.

For automakers like BMW the EV market is to them what the vegetarian market is to McDonalds. Sure we should all stop eating meat and save the planet but that ain't gonna happen. Falling sales in burgers, now that is a real problem. Same with ICE cars for the likes of BMW.

> They just didn't have the strength to make that move, for whatever reason.

The reason is well known: BMW has been too focused on sustaining innovations extending their current strengths than disruptive innovation that will eventually displace them -- classic Clayton Christensen:

Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.

http://claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/

Exactly this. It seems to be a natural cycle in most industries where there comes out a viable disrupter. Newcomer comes in to lead the pack in a differentiated part of a given market. They lead for years and displace their existing counterparts who fail to pivot for the sake of short term profit. "How can we risk X number of quarters or even years to sink profits back into R&D to become better and compete for years to come? What about next quarter?". The message is always the same from the incumbent side: they claim they're not concerned as new tech is a niche, then they realize the miss and spread FUD, and then they half ass enter to see if anyone's paying attention but the product still isn't near their competitor.

I saw this first hand in the firewall market starting back in 2012ish. Palo Alto Networks came to the plate with a fundamental shift. "Safely enable applications" was one of their original selling tactics. This went against other firewalls that were playing whack-a-mole with ports and IPs, where PAN was focusing on applications (App-ID). The founder, Nir Zuk, even made fun of his competitors (he had a very public rivalry with Gil Shwed, CEO of Checkpoint) by using "Innovators Dilemma" to showcase their failures to innovate based on the fact that they had a huge customer base they didn't want to disrupt, again in the name of quartely earnings and appeasing Wall Street. Fast forward 7+ years and PAN has eaten it's competition, but hasn't innovated in 4+ years. Now the company just buys up competition preemptively and will eventually realize the same fate Checkpoint did. Nir has fallen victim to his own hypocrisy. Successful? For sure. But that doesn't change the reality of their focus today (profit) vs earlier (R&D).

I think these cycles are natural and likely good for innovation within industries. Will BMW survive? Most likely. But over the next couple of decades they may be forced to reinvent, and as the article states they may be behind the rest of the pack playing catch-up due to the debt of not moving early and ignoring the intrinsic market signals.

"How can we risk X number of quarters or even years to sink profits back into R&D to become better and compete for years to come? What about next quarter?"

This is presented as shortsightedness, but that's misleading. It's not that the incumbent is willfully ignoring the threat, or choosing not to take a long view, but that they have an existing business which is much larger than the niche being attacked and they have to run that business this quarter and next. If they abandon it, they've just destroyed everything they have anyway.

If it was mere foolishness with an obvious counter, it wouldn't happen over and over again to people who think they know better.

This is not something I thought of, this is something that was explained quite well by the person who, I think, coined the term "disruptive innovation" and whose book I read in college back in the late 90s.

My Wall Street example isn't misleading. It's very well known and defined and was actually a big component to the write up about the looming Boeing bailout that hit the FP yesterday [0]. It's not about abandoning. It's about prioritizing R&D and futures equally with QoQ and YoY profits. Balancing those two is extremely important for fiscal gain and continuuing to stay relevant in the face of Innovators Dilemma.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-coming-boeing-bailout

As an aside, I’m curious: who do you think will do to PAN what they did to Checkpoint and other firewall vendors? If PAN is not innovating, who is? Thanks.

Honestly, nobody - yet. Keep in mind Checkpoint also had a good 6+ year run after innovation really shifted to sales and profit. I think the disruption comes in the SDN space focusing on organic aspects within. The next buzz in software defined is SDS (software defined security). PAN did just buy Twistlock, but that model isn't disruptive IMO. The hardware firewall is effectively dead. With TLS 1.3 and HTTP/3 they will be relegated to a clunky door stops in the network. PAN is on a buying spree to get ahead of what they can't figure out how to develop and get ahead of the looming drop in hardware sales. Look at "Prisma" or "Cortex XD". Effectively rename and rebrand existing, legacy products that didn't sell and aren't effective that marketing got a hold of. Prisma is just PAN running VMs in the cloud for customers on GCP. A) That's a horrible model for efficiency because the underlying technology is still the same (OpenVPN/IPsec) and B) it's a great model for sales because they upcharge like nuts for something simple to run. Finally, PAN wants to sell anyone and everyone an ELA. Why? Because they can't sell the majority of their bought and paid for product line item by item. So instead of try they get customers hooked into paying 10, 15, 20 percent more than what they would have buying some firewalls and they toss in software for "free" knowning very well that said customer likely won't use half of it. It's also a great lockout model. Take the CASB space for example. Why not buy an ELA from PAN and get firewalls and Aperture included than buy firewalls and Netskope? There's no reason when you look at it through the lens of procurement and PAN knows this.

I would suggest taking a look at Hybrid Cloud Workload Protection.

I can break down the buzzwords a little:

- Hybrid Cloud = Works in an on-premises DC and public cloud(s) - Workload = Works on bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers - Protection = - Distributed micro-segmentation (enforced via host firewalls, as close as possible to the app, sometimes integrated with the app) - Vulnerability analysis (build time and/or runtime) - Exploit detection

This is typically achieved via a small agent that runs on each "workload" backed by some type of centralized control appliance.

Guess who one of the innovators in this space is? You might not believe it...

Cisco.

Right?! What goes around comes around.

The CWP market is still somewhat nascent, but in my opinion, it is poised to explode.

Like the parent pointed out, the days of traditional hardware firewalls - or even worse "virtualized" versions of said boxes - are numbered, like it or not.

Disclaimer: I work on Tetration, Cisco's 3-year old in-house developed Hybrid Cloud Workload Protection product. That's right, not an acquisition.

Oh, and did I mention, the whole thing is a SaaS that requires zero hardware?

As you know Tetration has been around a number of years. While it may be one of the few in-house products, on the security side, that Cisco hasn't acquired it's very akin to Cisco ISE in my opinion. Cisco drives hardware through software because that's (still) where the margin can be made up. Tetration isn't all that different in that line of thinking. Let's look at the data sheet to find the hidden, proprietary link to hardware, shall we?

"The Cisco Tetration platform is designed to fully address these challenges, using comprehensive traffic telemetry data collected from both servers and Cisco Nexus® switches." [0]

And there it is... Also it looks like Cisco wants to sell you Tetration hardware clusters. To be fair it looks like you can also run Tetration-V on your own, but you'll still pay for licensing.

Regardless I still think this is a miss for the next decade. Partially because the solution is dependent on proprietary hardware and partially because the solution is "agent" based, which is a legacy approach to security spun out in Tetration by ties to hardware and a bundled data lake (Elastic, I assume?).

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/data-cente...

Your comment is accurate, but I would add some extra clarifications, since we run very much like a start-up, you can imagine things have changed a little over the three years!

True, you can use the Nexus 9000 switches to generate flow telemetry, however, neither are they the recommended or most popular data gathering point, that would be the software agent which has no hardware dependency.

This interestingly links to other discussions in the thread re: keeping the run-rate business strong while growing an innovative business in parallel. In Cisco, everything pays tribute to the switch, but that does not mean we are dictated by it ;) - a reasonable compromise to foster innovation.

Also true, you can buy Tetration in a physical appliance format (many customers want this for their reasons), but the majority of customers actually go for the Tetration-as-a-Service option which has no hardware dependency.

Agent based is always an interesting topic. For us, it is about getting as close as possible to the application we are to protect, and being agent based is about as close as you can go before getting into the code path, in a cross-platform, cross-infrastructure way. What this allows us to do is apply proper security controls like zero-trust that we take for granted in newer environments (like Kubernetes, which also often uses agents, they just named them sidecars) to legacy environments, where the bulk of today’s business applications still run.

+ Yes, Elastic is part of our stack, alongside a lot of other interesting technology. We process millions of events per second from all sorts of sources, like campus user logons, process executions, and new flows all in short order, detect how we should mutate the state of the "data centre" security based on the new information, then take actions like dynamically updating ACLs across tens of thousands of workloads to allow a new administrator SSH access since they logged onto a desktop in the London branch, while at the same time updating rules on the shared databases due to an application that just failed over to the secondary DC in Ashburn. I could talk on this topic for a long time as I find it highly interesting, but I'll hold on for another post.

All BMW had to do was put an electric engine in a 3 series body. Nope. Couldn't do it.

Instead, they ditched their history, customer base and treated the EV market as a total joke: i3.

My i3 is the best car I ever owned.

sorry but the i8 is not what i'd consider an ev being a hybrid only...

from: https://www.bmwusa.com/vehicles/bmwi/bmw-i8.html?

"With the electric motor and combustion engine providing a total output of 369hp and 420 lb-ft of torque, the i8 Coupe and i8 Roadster more than live up to the sporting heritage of BMW – blowing through 0-60mph in as little as 4.2 seconds."

so it's also not particularly fast either... considering a non performance tesla model s with 4+ seats does 4.0s and is really an ev...

so the i8 is more of a gas car... this IMO is why it didn't sell very well either. It's not an ev and it's not that fast compared to a tesla that it was trying to position itself against...

Thank you, you're correct! TIL. I thought the i8 was an EV, I had no idea it was just another hybrid. I'm sure it's an engineering marvel, and it's really pretty IMO, but not being a pure EV makes it significantly less appealing to me. I mistakenly thought all of the i* vehicles were EVs. I'm that much more disappointed in BMW now. I am a long time fan of BMW and am in the market for a new car and really wish they offered an EV equivalent to the M3.

I was a bmw fan but now tesla. If you haven’t test driven one they are amazing.

There are many factors at play here.

Technology: BMW's bet was on lightweight materials and less on battery technology as an enabler for ecological, electric vehicles. Production is still costly and more complex than for e.g. the 3 series. Currently, there is only one plant that is equipped with the necessary manufacturing capabilities (Leipzig).

Manufacturing: You need to adapt the assembly lines, which is not as trivial as it may sound. BMW's future platforms will allow assembly of EV's along ICE's on the same belts! At that point, you can produce EVs in all of BMW's plants (... with some modifications)

Financial: BMW is not really making money with the i3, production is too costly. Given that BMW is a public company, you don't want to mass produce a product that eats your profit. Try to explain that to "traditional" shareholders that like their dividends. TSLA is an entirely different stock, which can do what it does due to its growth story.

Also: Plants cost a lot of money build and operate. Stopping the production in a plant for a while to remodel it for a different assembly process as well (... not to mention the retraining of all the workers, new logistical processes). The magnitude is somewhere in the million dollars per day.

Human factors: In German labor law, you can't just fire people. Giving up on ICEs means that you have a lot of people that are not qualified for alternative technologies and need to be retrained. This does not happen in days or weeks - at the scale of BMW this takes years and of course is happening.

Sourcing: You need to source all the materials, incl. batterie. My guess is that BMW wanted to work with established players that know car manufacturing. However, that was probably a mistake given that e.g. BOSCH decided to quit (https://electrek.co/2018/02/28/bosch-gives-up-battery-cell-p...)

Shareholders: We had the topic before, but BMW is special here that the Quandt family owns roughly 46% of BMW. Accordingly they have a major influence on all decisions at BMW. They act definitely not like an Elon Musk - they are very cautious and strategic. They also seem to act labor friendly and have a positive impact on the work conditions at BMW (... again meaning that they will make sure that BMW doesn't have to let go a lot of people).

This is classic Innovator's Dilemma behavior.

Jeremy Clarkson's surprisingly positive review[0] of the i8 made me want to take a second look at it, which I did. It was just as nice and pleasant as JC said it'd be, but there were two problems.

It was twice the price of an M3/M4. 20 million yen for the i8 versus 10million for a top of the line M3 or M4. Prices in Japan for foreign makes are already marked up, because they're perceived as a luxury good. The i8 was marked up even more. At that price, I'd rather get an Aston.

Next one is a subjective thing, it's looks are a bit too flashy doesn't it? Nice thing about the M cars (and Teslas), they blend in.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk8p2R6trfE

Borders Bookstore didn't want to cannibalize sales either and they don't exist anymore.

Citation?

AFAIU Borders succumbed more to overexpansion and debt than legacy-protection.

See:

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/19/138514209/why-borders-failed-...

http://business.time.com/2011/07/19/5-reasons-borders-went-o...

It's not a coincidence that Borders, Waldenbooks, Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble all got, essentially, decimated in the same era that saw the rise of Amazon and its Kindle.

Waldenbooks had been around since 1933. Books-A-Million dates to 1917. Borders to 1971. Barnes & Noble has been around in some form for ~150 years.

It wasn't overexpansion and debt that destroyed them all (yes, some are still standing in a straggling-on-zombie sort of way).

That is not the same as saying cannibalisation-aversion killed the firm.

I'm aware the industry has seen shifts.

They also had a bunch of employee turnover and haven't done anything interesting with electric cars in ~6 years. The i3 was really good back then, boring now.

The i3 was really good in what way? Around here nobody owns one, and it seems BMW has been dumping them into the rental market with the "REACH NOW" program.

Because they never market it seriously. Where I live, it was a challenge to try one, even harder to find a salesman that can sell you the car. Nearly nobody knows about that car.

It's the only car in the industry that took seriously sustainability. (Sustainable textile, recycled material, end of life reusability and recycling. etc.)

The efficiency is excellent, about 5kwh less per 100km than a tesla. It drives great, it's powerful, fun to drive. I haven't found a i3 owner that didn't like his car yet.

With the range extender it removed range anxiety without add long recharge time on a trip. (granted with more frequent stop)

I bought a used one last week. Maybe it's the honey moon, but it's the best car I have ever own, by far.

The lack of leadership from top executive made the car unpopular, not the car itself. This also led to a lot of employee turnover because the lack of seriousness about the i series.

The i3 may be a good car for you, but it's not an alternative to a person considering a 3 or 5 series. That's the miss. While the car may be great, it's target market is small. In the US the i3 has a very small set of buyers and those buyers, if not BMW fans, will likely buy a Model 3 or Chevy Volt before the BMW. Both cars are more bang for the buck and can handle small families better/cheaper. The i3, with the range extender, basically turns the car into a hybrid - which exemplifies BMWs miss on what people want in an EV. If I'm going to buy an EV I don't want all the maintenance hassle of dealing with IC.

There have been many cars in history that have been popular beyond what top leadership has said. The failure of the i3 isn't that. It's a car that has a very small target market. If that was their goal, that's fine. But if they thought it was going to sell well BMW dropped the ball.

Regardless, it's good for you since you likely got a great deal.

> with the range extender, basically turns the car into a hybrid

That's not fair since (unless you mod it) the REX only kicks in when you get to 6% battery. In the year I have been driving the i3 I have used less then a gallon of gas.

What's not fair? That the range isn't that of it's EV peers and so instead of address this with longer range batteries BMW made a cognizant decision to give buyers the option of a hybrid? Think about your statement: "In the year I have been driving the i3 I have used less then a gallon of gas." That would terrify me more than dealing with electric range for extended trips from time to time. Why? Because gasoline has a shelf life and all IC components are generally built and expected to run on a frequent basis. If that engine truly didn't run for almost a year, and let's say that is normal for i3 owners, then BMW is going to have a large number of those "range extender" customers needing repair for failed injectors and/or fuel pumps. I don't know enough about the i3 but I'm guessing it runs by force over the year, even if not required, to overcome this? Even then you have the issue of stale, non-stabilized gas.

Yeah it runs for 10 minutes each month. The motor is from a BMW moped so the maintenance should be simpler than a regular car engine plus it is never heavily loaded - always runs at optimum RPM. I occasionally put in a 1/4 gallon to freshen it up.

The i3 isn't even in the same family as the 3 and even less the 5. Think more a Toyota C-HR, Mini Cooper, maybe Fiat 500.

That's exactly my point.

Well but underlying your point was an assumption that the 3 and 5 competed against the i3 at all. It's not a "miss" that someone in the market for a pickup truck passes on the BMWs, either.

I kind of think BMW has generally lost its way. Their model line is bananas. They're great cars in some ways but damn the electronics are a pain in my ass! Like the battery registration--no reason why you can't add a menu that tells the computer "new battery installed" oh no, can't do that, have to have dealer-level software and equipment. I had to buy a code reader type tool for $150 that can do that instead of it just being a built-in feature. This is design for purely post sales profit margin enhancement.

Also, why do automakers keep taking the spare tires away? If you live near a city, well, great, but anyone who lives outside of "town" needs to be self-sufficient.

I appreciate a lot about the car, but its time is almost up. There are some screwy German things about it that just get more annoying as time goes by and lots of things broke before even 50K miles that never broke on Toyotas and Hondas I owned. BMW needs to go back to making cars, not computers on wheels.

I3 has always been a nutty car at an outrageous price ($50k) with a $20k discount if you were a savvy shopper, but still a stupid compliance car that uses motorcycle wheels and is too small and had deep subsidies to allow BMW to play in the USA market without disturbing their precious ICE car lines ...

I couldn't imagine buying one new, but there seem to be a fair number of used i3s that are 4-5 years old and well under $20K.

i3 is very expensive, very sophisticatedly engineered, but also very shoddily engineered at the same time.

Despite using a full CFRP body, like that of supercars, mass savings were small.

It is also heavy because of tons of German luxury features that should have no place in an entry level vehicle.

It was also generically marketed on being "sporty" and "fun" to drive, while being one of the more morbid EV around, much like Chinese entry level EVs.

The design suffers from usage of enormous amount of unique, custom made parts and materials.

Basically it is an EV equivalent of Suzuki Mehran on performance and feel, but painted over to make it fit the "New Type Luxury EV" marketing concept.

Highly disagree about performance. I find it more fun to drive than my 2011 305Hp mustang.

No lag, always full torque.

> No lag, always full torque.

Just like any EV, but without ludicrous acceleration of top tier EVs, or just that of average sport car. And despite being an RWD car, it turns and handles the road not much better than FWD econoboxes, which means no actual motorsport person was involved in its design.

it's the standard innovators dilemma isn't it. They're making X amount of money, to go full into EV space, they'll make less than X amount of money temporarily while they they ramp up EVs. Yes, it's a risk but somewhat a validated one. But they will cannibalize themselves as they move to new space.

Most businesses never want to make a step that makes them less money, it has to be growth, growth, growth at any cost.

This is why startups win, because they make less than X money, and can afford to chose different paths to slowly move up. Big Corps are notoriously afraid of choosing paths that cannibalizes their main business.

Barnes & Noble, Kodak, Yahoo, Blockbuster - Got killed by that sort of thinking.

Yes this seems right and this won't be last automotive executive who makes this mistake.