When the BMW i8 launched, it was met with a chorus from the automotive media: The car was nice and cool and all, but it could’ve really used more power to back up that styling. So BMW’s M division went back to the drawing board and penned a 560-horsepower successor that retained the supercar styling and hybrid drivetrain — only to kill it unceremoniously, shortly before a debut, to focus efforts on the XM.
Author Steve Saxty recently spoke with YouTuber Joe Achilles to promote his book BMW By Design, which includes the so-called “i16" successor to the i8. BMW’s head of design Domagoj Dukec even posted design models of the car earlier this year, with styling close to that of the Vision M Next concept from 2019. According to Saxty, the i16 was very nearly complete before the project was shuttered:
You may recall the Vision M Next, with the orange. But what we didn’t know out there, and I was pleased that we revealed it in the book, they got 95 percent towards finishing a production of the car. And that is it, that’s project i16.
...
In design terms, it’s what they call “Class A” surfacing, so that means all the surfaces are “mature” as opposed to like cartoon-like, and they’ve done much more than that beneath the surface. They’ve done body engineering as well.
So the idea of this car would have been to take the basics of i8 — if you look at the window shape, that’s actually i8 derived with a new doorskin outer — and it was taking the guts of the i8 and putting a four-cylinder, not a three-cylinder engine, in it.
Saxty says BMW faced a decision during the COVID lockdown era with regard to resources for the M division: it could either produce the i16 or the XM. We know which way the company went, given that one of those cars exists in the real world and the other doesn’t, and it’s hard to argue BMW made the wrong move in the face of the market. Consumers buy SUVs — sorry, SAVs — in greater numbers than coupes.
It’s a shame that companies chase the market so aggressively, particularly with halo cars that shouldn’t need to sell in volume, but such is life under a system that demands infinite economic growth from finite physical resources. The XM we got is a cool enough design on its own, but knowing it cost us the performance-focused i16, a proper M1 successor, is rough.