{"id":2070591,"date":"2026-07-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2070591"},"modified":"2026-07-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T21:00:00","slug":"bmw-i8-long-term-review-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2070591","title":{"rendered":"BMW i8 – long-term review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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September 2014, and we had the very first BMW i8 in the UK for a showdown with its rivals<\/a>. Here\u2019s the conclusion I wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people have declared the i8 to not be as good a sports car as the Porsche 911. And they\u2019re right. It\u2019s not as good at the traditional sports car stuff as the 911. Because it\u2019s not a traditional sports car and it\u2019s not right to judge it as such. Instead it\u2019s a car that open-minded people will come to from across the car-owning spectrum and the genius of it is that the biggest compromise they\u2019ll have to make is that it\u2019s a bit awkward to get in and out of.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“Would I have it over the 911? Whew, tricky one, but yes, I think I would \u2013 it feels as though BMW has redirected the whole sports car class. The ball is back in Porsche\u2019s court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hasn\u2019t aged well has it? Back then, when the i8 was freshly minted, it looked like a new world of sports car possibilities was opening up and that downsized, electrically-boosted cars were going to be the future. 12 years further on and BMW\u2019s i8 experiment is over, while Porsche\u2019s most significant change to the 911 has been to fit it with turbochargers. Otherwise nothing has changed, the sports car market has sailed on and everyone who tried to do something different (think downsized AMGs<\/a> and lightweight Alpines<\/a>) got their fingers burned.<\/p>\n

But no-one pushed as hard – nor invested so much – as BMW. The i8 was so radical, so clear and pure in its thinking and philosophy that BMW didn\u2019t stop to think whether it would sell. It didn\u2019t, so it died. Now, for Alpine, this second hand scarcity has manifested in super-strong residual values. Cars that were probably \u00a345k new are still, seven years and 50,000 miles down the line, around \u00a335,000.<\/p>\n

The i8, as you\u2019ll be well aware if you\u2019ve read any more of these reports, has suffered far more. I\u2019m assuming its complexity puts people off. I\u2019d be lying if I said I didn\u2019t have similar thoughts myself, no matter how many times I\u2019ve been told by BMW specialists that there\u2019s very little to fear and that BMW was so determined to make it work that the \u2018i\u2019 cars were massively over-engineered and developed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But what of the third car in that group test? Following conventional sports car wisdom, the Jaguar F-Type<\/a> should be a complete winner. It\u2019s the most traditional sports car you can design, a handsome front-engined, rear-drive coupe. With the option of a supercharged V8. And it\u2019s also now dead.<\/p>\n

Some cited its failure to adapt and modernise as the reason for its demise. The irony. And like the i8, used values are very attractive – V8s with similar age and mileage to mine are similar money, too (and way more expensive to run given \u00a3790 annual tax and 22mpg – just saying).<\/p>\n

The truth of the matter seems to be that everyone else comes and goes, Porsche carries on regardless. I got it wrong with my forecasting, but right everywhere else. And yes, I did have it over a Porsche 911. Although it helped that it was half the price.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 2014, and we had the very first BMW i8 in the UK for a showdown with its rivals. Here\u2019s the conclusion I wrote. \u201cMany people have declared the i8 to not be as good a sports car as the Porsche 911. And they\u2019re right. It\u2019s not as good at the traditional sports car stuff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-2070591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2070591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2070591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2070591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2070591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}