BMW Should Be Ashamed This Aftermarket BMW iX3 Frunk Kit Exists

A while back I wrote about how I believed that German automakers who are building EVs somehow don’t seem to give a brace of BMs about frunks, and that drives me bonkers. One of my automotive fetishes is space utilization, so when I know that there’s large, usable volumes of space being wasted in a car, it hurts. And BMW does a lot of hurting with their entire current line of EV cars, which have tantalizing volumes of space that they refuse to make available to their loyal customers, for reasons I can’t begin to guess at. Happily, there’s brave frunk-warriors out there selling the bits needed to make a front trunk that BMW somehow left out.

It’s not like BMW doesn’t know how to make a frunk; not only did they have them on the old BMW 700s, their bold and innovative earlier EV, the i3, had a small yet functional and very appreciated little frunk:

I know they know how to make frunks. That’s not the problem here. The problem is that on their newer electric cars, they simply haven’t bothered to even try, even in the most perfunctory way, to permit the empty volumes under the hood to be reclaimed by their rightful owners. So, the aftermarket has stepped in.

I’m not specifically endorsing any particular company, but this one, Wokeby, happened to catch my attention. They seem to specialize in BMW i-series cars, with trunk kits for the BMW iX3 and i4. Here, look at these installation videos so you can see just how substantial the frunks they make actually are! First, the iX3:

That’s a good-sized frunk! Here’s the i4 one:

That’s big, too! You can fit plenty of things into either of these frunks, especially stuff like EV charging cables that would otherwise be taking up space in the rear cargo area, possibly under all the other stuff you’re carrying in there, making it wildly inconvenient if you actually have to get them, because then you have to empty out everything else. The kind of situation you might be on a roadtrip or something.

It’s not just about the extra space, it’s about having an additional, separate space.

When I spoke with designers and engineers at BMW about this, I was told – with a bit of what kind of felt like condescension –  that the rear cargo area was large enough for anyone, and I shouldn’t care about a frunk. This, of course, is maddening. There is absolutely no technical reason why BMW couldn’t have made frunks just like these from the factory – likely they could have done it even better.

It’s just arrogance at this point! Stop denying your customers the space they own, BMW! These aftermarket frunk kits should cause you shame! A kit should be sent to every current frunkless BMW EV owner with a fruit basket and apology letter as a proper factory frunk is being developed!

And in this competitive EV market, where so many of BMW’s competitors do have frunks, it seems like madness to build these cars without them. It’s technically trivial, and the space is already there, unused, being dragged around by the car anyway – an enclosed volume that could be helping the owner. There’s no reason to ever assume a car owner doesn’t need more space – they paid for the enclosed volume of that car, and if there’s space that could be used for humans or cargo, the owner should, morally, have access to it.

Yes, I’m going to die on this hill. And then I’m going to demand my corpse be wadded into a ball and crammed into the front trunk of some car, dammit, because that’s how it should be.