Simply Abu Dhabi Magazine XVI

2 2 3 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I I t’s not every day that a humble motoring writer can claim to have seen into the future but, having spent a little time with the latest, truly electrifying model from BMW, I feel I may have done just that. The i8 really does seem like something plucked from the pages of a science fiction novel, but, to my mind at least, this car of the future has a very real link to a particularly glorious past. It’s all in the layout, you see. For here the i8 shares its mid-engined design with a BMW from years ago that set my pulse racing at an early age. That car was the M1, the original BMW M-car and spiritual forefather of all the high performance BMWs created since. This fabulous car is no throwback though. It’s been designed and engineered to redefine the sports car, rather than follow convention. No longer a concept, the i8 is in full production, manufactured from the lightest, strongest materials available, using the most advanced techniques that BMW could apply. As such, it’s nothing short of a revelation. And the innovation doesn’t end there. The i8 is driven by a revolutionary petrol-electric plug-in hybrid power train supplying motivation to all four wheels to create something a little miraculous: an all-new hypercar that hits the road at a fraction of the price such sophisticated, not to mention visually stunning, vehicles generally command. Of course, when it comes to getting behind the wheel, all that technical complexity means nothing if the car can’t deliver the kind of performance and all-round driving experience that the term hypercar demands. So does the rest of this car match up to what the technology promises? The real body and soul of the i8 is BMW’s revolutionary LifeDrive platform. By combining doors and a passenger cell constructed from resin-injected carbon fibre- reinforced plastic with front and rear subframes and crash structures in aluminium, the BMW engineers have created a car with an unbelievably lightweight body. As it stands, the CFRP tub weighs half as much as steel and is even 30 percent lighter than an aluminium tub.