The BMW i8 was the perfect car at the wrong time – Thank Frankel it’s Friday (Monday Special)

On Autotrader right now there is a ‘19’ plate 2019 car with 2,500 miles on the clock for £65,450. Which is over £50,000 off list price for an all but new car, before you’ve knocked the price back a few grand more with a good old haggle, and taking no account of its many optional extras.

If I had the money and wasn’t required always to be driving other cars, it would be parked outside my house now. I once spent a year with an i8 and of all the cars I’ve run long term – including the Porsche 911 that replaced it – it is the one I miss most, excepting the McLaren 720S which was wonderful of course, but really a flight of fantasy.

So what went wrong? Three things I think. First I think every brand has a natural price level, above which it is difficult to sell cars, partly because it’s not a part of the market the brand regularly frequents, partly because in Europe in general and the UK in particular, we are continent/nation of badge snobs. And a BMW costing £115,000 is I would say at the upper limit for that marque.

My second point qualifies the first. You can charge that kind of money for, say, an M8, because it is a mere derivative of an extant far more affordable product so the additional marginal cost to make the flagship model is low. Therefore if it doesn’t sell in huge quantities, there’s not much financial exposure, particularly if other related BMWs benefit from its reflected glory. But for a dedicated, and exceptionally expensive platform off which no other cars can be spun? If that doesn’t sell, the business case evaporates.

Finally I think many people spending this kind of money on a sports GT just struggle with the idea of it having a three-cylinder engine from a Mini. Which I understand entirely: you’d expect a V8 minimum. But if you actually live with the i8, you simply forget: the engine sounds great and while some moan about the fact that much of that sound is synthesised, I’d bet plenty there’s not an expensive sports, GT or supercar on sale about which the same cannot be said to some extent or another.

My sadness with the demise of the i8 is that it was exactly the right car at fractionally the wrong time. As Marty McFly says after playing an extravagant guitar solo to a bemused 1955 audience in Back to the Future, ‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet.’ Fifteen years later they’d have lapped up every riff.

And 15 years from now when V8 engines are part of automotive history as they most assuredly will be, we will goggle at the fact that 20 years earlier BMW brought to market a car with a super light carbon-fibre structure and a tiny but brilliant plug-in electric powertrain, and we turned around and simply said ‘no thanks’. One day BMW will be proved to have been right all along, but for the ground-breaking and should-have-been game-changing i8, it will be all far too late.