The BMW i3 Was A Design Success, Even If It Was A Failure

It’s probably not escaped your attention there’s been more weirdness than usual happening around here. David has gone full LA and become all fancy, buying himself an actual functioning modern vehicle to drive to the smoothie bar and yoga classes [Editor’s Note: Technically it has a failed battery, though I did recently get my first massage. -DT]. Torch has been expounding about car design, defending the unloved Mini Clubman. Me, supposedly the bougie artistic one? I’ve been getting my hands dirty wrenching. It’s like The Autopian have remade Freaky Friday, only more shit. David’s probably writing the screenplay right now.

David’s chariot of choice for his new LA lifestyle is the BMW i3, and as a designer, and out of concern for his general wellbeing, I wholeheartedly approve. Of course, being David he bought the cheapest one he could find, and it needs a battery replacement, but still it’s a start. I love the i3 (and its stunning i8 sibling), and you’d struggle to find a professional car designer who doesn’t agree with me. Both cars represented a tremendous leap forward in the way cars are engineered and constructed, a bright shining future of sustainability and ec0-friendliness. But it turned out to be a future never to materialize, a dead end fork in the road in the fast moving EV revolution. We’re constantly hearing legacy OEMs don’t take risks, don’t know what they’re doing, and are committed to peddling the same old shit year in, year out. BMW took one hell of gamble with the i3 and i8, but neither are being directly replaced, so what the hell happened?

The i3’s Roots: The BMW E1

The i3 didn’t totally appear out of the blue. Like most OEMs, BMW had been doing the usual half-assed attempts at electrification for years, starting with a 1602 with 12 12-volt lead acid batteries under the hood. Two were built, and one was used to pace runners in the marathon at the 1972 Munich Olympics, so the athletes wouldn’t be exposed to lung clogging exhaust fumes. BMW mucked about cramming batteries of differing chemistries under the hoods of various 3 series over the following decades, before in 1991 revealing their first purpose built electric car concept, the E1.

If you squint hard enough you can trace the genesis of the i3 back to the E1. A three door, four-seater city car, it sort of looked like a puffer fish E30; a pumped-up volume with a body of recycled plastic built upon an aluminum frame; similar to how the i3 would eventually be constructed. The Z11 E1 was only ever intended to be a concept; BMW wanted to see if such a car could be feasible for production, because looming California Zero Emission Vehicle legislation was scaring all the OEMs to death.

They tried again with a second generation Z15 E1 concept, which pulled up the belt line, reduced the glass to body ratio and pushed the wheels right out to the corners. It was lot uglier, but BMW were ingesting the good drugs and getting wild. They built two versions; a pure EV and get this–a four cylinder hybrid, years before Toyota had even dreamt of such a thing. At the time the BMW range consisted of three models for the discerning driver, not the bewildering array of wheeled circus freaks they offer now. So BMW coming up with an EV urban vehicle was like me suddenly wearing a color other than black – an actual WTF moment.

A Stunning Exterior Not Unlike That Of BMW’s Initial Concept

The i3 we’ve come to know and love was first shown as the Mega City Vehicle concept in 2011. In 2012, London surprised the world by not making a complete dog’s dinner of the Olympics, and BMW used the event to show the prototype i3, prior to a worldwide reveal of the actual car in 2013. A common complaint from the cheap seats is that concepts never make it into production unaltered, but the i3, aside from changes to the full depth glazing and lighting elements, was really as close as it’s feasible to get.

This is the first thing you notice about the i3–it’s utterly distinctive and looks like nothing else on the road. In my early days as a car design student I thought EVs and hybrids should look like “space cars from the future.” I later realized this was a bit naive, because the mainstream is pretty conservative in its taste. No one wants to look like they’ve just beamed down on an away mission to Earth when they’re out running errands.

Famed American industrial designer Raymond Loewe called this the MAYA principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. This is what he said:
“The adult public’s taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm.”

In other words, your design should be advanced, but not so advanced as to alienate your customers. You need to ease in radical change gradually. This was what Tesla got right by making its cars anonymously handsome in a generic way – they didn’t really look that different from the norm despite being high tech EVs (early Tesla Model S’s had grilles). By doing things like making the carbon skeleton of the car visible when you opened the doors, BMWs approach was arguably more honest from a design theory point of view, and yet, as much as designers like me venerate them, the BMW pair were a step too far for the masses.

Sketched by Richard Kim (now the chief designer at Canoo) under the supervision of Benoit Jacob, the i3 is basically a monovolume – a one box design. By moving the wheels to the corners it gains a wicked stance. It has very bold graphics–the black hood and side glazing break up the shape, and continue to the roof which is also black because it’s made from left over offcuts of carbon fiber. Thus blackout continues all the way down the rear windshield and tailgate glass, giving a consistent appearance that separates the bodysides, highlighting how the car is constructed and making it look substantial and solid.

The dip in the window line on the rear doors is the one part I’m not sold on–I’d lower the glass on the front doors to match–but it stops the car looking too blobby and gives it a futuristic vibe, helped by the subtle use of blue as a highlight color. It’s a high tech version of body on frame construction rather than a monocoque, just this time the frame is aluminum and the body is carbon fiber with thermoplastic body panels. The thinking was this would allow BMW to swap a different shape onto the frame at a later date, something that never happened. Because it’s so light and strong, they were able to do away with the B pillar and have rear hinged back doors for better access into the interior.

What An Interior! (Also, Some Words On Sustainability)

And what an interior. Inside, BMW used recycled PET bottles for the plastics, plant based leathers and eucalyptus wood–one of the fastest growing trees. BMW wasn’t just paying the usual lip service to sustainability with the i3–they were all in. They built the carbon fiber plant at Moses Lake, Washington because it’s one of the largest sources of hydroelectric power in the world and working with carbon fiber has incredible energy requirements.

Traditionally, carbon fiber required laying up by hand before being baked in an autoclave, taking several days. BMW developed a process called resin transfer molding, where the material was placed in a mold, injected with resin and baked all at once, making it more suitable for volume (but crucially not mass) production. Extensive use of proprietary adhesives minimized the number of metal fasteners needed, again reducing material costs and saving weight. It has big but narrow wheels, to maintain the size of the contact patch while improving aero, especially important for EVs where a low aero count is crucial for efficiency. This kind of clever rethinking of how to build a car as sustainably as possible was central to the design direction of the whole car.

Carbon Fiber Means It Was Lightweight, But Expensive To Build

What resulted was a premium urban EV that was really roomy and light for its size. The non-range extender version only weighs about 2600lbs (1195kg). More importantly than that, it went and drove like a real BMW. This wasn’t some compromised eco-weenie medical appliance of a car like a Nissan Leaf. It was a genuine, driver focused RWD BMW. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Chevy Bolt is sort of an i3 drawn by someone being given a description over the telephone, unsuccessfully attempting to ape its surface but not its substance.

If all this sounds incredibly expensive, hooo boy. It’s estimated BMW spent nearly $3 billion in R&D costs alone. Both the i3 and the i8 were released under the i brand, which was BMWs brand for future alternative powertrain vehicles, like the fuel cell i5 that never appeared. The i3 wasn’t meant to be a massive seller; despite all the effort BMW put into developing carbon fiber manufacturing processes that could be used on a conventional production line, it could never be built quickly or cheaply enough for big volumes, totaling just under 230,000 units over nine years on sale.

If we include the i8’s rather less successful total sales of 20,000 or so, that R&D cost works out to about $11,000. Per car. So it’s a pretty safe assumption that BMW lost several shirts on every i3 and i8 sold. And this is why they’re not being replaced directly. BMW and other OEMs pretty quickly figured out the only way to scale profitable EV production is to have them share a platform with ICE models and have them come down the same line, even if that means an inherently compromised car that doesn’t take full advantage of the benefits an EV package can offer. Bleeding edge early adopters or weirdos like me apart, the buying public doesn’t want to stand out. They don’t want oddball space cars of the future any more than they want to wear a pair of Snapchat glasses, no matter how stylish they are.

The i3 Was A Failure, But A Special Failure

The BMW i3 and i8 are the kind of cars designers love, because they weren’t just a tinkering of the sheet metal but a wholesale ground up shift of both form and function, something we’re often accused of neglecting. Shit, the chair of my vehicle design course at the Royal College of Art got an i8 into the swanky Design Museum in London, so if that’s not a measure of their design credibility I’ll eat a marker. Great design never comes cheap, and when the margins are slim, cold hard commercial reality sets in, no matter how noble your intentions are. A good designer does well to remember that.

Photos: BMW