Frankfurt Was Fine—Especially The Champagne
Yes, I did attend the Frankfurt Auto Show again, but as usual, I missed all the good stuff, like the guy who took a sledgehammer to his M6 in a display of—something. (He was unhappy with certain issues that had not been resolved to his satisfaction.)
I missed the M4 Concept, for example.
Yeah, I know, we had already seen the car at Oktoberfest, where there were several fistfights involving its color, called Aurum Dust or something. Somebody said it resembles the sheen on a puddle of spilled antifreeze, but it reminded me more of high-test Mountain Dew, fresh from the can or reprocessed. Anyway, the car was nowhere to be seen at the Frankfurt show, even though the BMW Group staged a huge number involving at least a dozen cars and a slew of motorcycles all on stage together—impressive.
But for BMW, the Frankfurt show was all about the i8 and its homely little brother, the i3. No way they were going to let the electrics be upstaged by a Mountain-Dew-hued M4.
Now, the rollout of the i8 may have seemed like a déjà vu hat trick, because Frankfurt veterans first saw something like this car in 2009, when BMW rolled out the Vision Efficient Dynamics Concept. That wowed the crowd and initiated Building Eleven, BMW’s new permanent home at the Frankfurt show. Two years later, it's back—no, wait, now it’s the i8 Concept, and it's beginning to look like a real car.
That was two years ago, and finally, in 2013, here is Dr. Norbert Reithofer again, this time stepping out of the real thing: a production i8. And wonder of wonders, they have retained enough of the way-cool elements of the concept cars—like the scissor doors—to make the car enticingly exotic. How enticing? Well, at less than $137,000 for the most technically advanced sports car on the planet, I personally know half a dozen people who are already enticed.
If the i8 is the high-school jock with the letter jacket, cheerleader clutching his leather-clad sleeve, the i3 is his nerdy little brother, the one with his glasses held together with white adhesive tape, a pocket protector in his short-sleeve button-down shirt. He’s the kid who gets all A’s and a sympathy date to the prom.
Remember, geeky is the new cool.
And BMW put an army of all-electric i3 clones to the forefront at the Frankfurt show; not only were they giving test rides on a multi-level track inside the building, they also had a fleet of i3s ferrying journalists from Building Eleven to the other edifices of the show, including Building Five, which housed the Alpina display, my favorite Frankfurt-show retreat. You may recall that in addition to building bad-ass cars, Alpina distributes wine—great wines. This year they were pouring a nice blanc de blancs Champagne, which pretty much precluded my hiking off to look at the new Skoda.
The i3 shuttles were very popular with journalists. In fact, journos would wait patiently in line to ride the i3, waving away Mercedes and other lesser shuttles.
The lines for the shuttle i3s were shorter than the lines inside the building for i3 test rides, so certain journalists—my lips are sealed—employed the tactic of climbing into the i3 at Building Eleven and asking for a ride to Building One. Arriving there, they would sheepishly ask, “Um, could you take me back to Building Eleven?”
So far, BMW’s plunge into carbon-fiber-construction electric cars and hybrids—a four-billion-dollar gamble at this point—seems to be gaining momentum, even if the visage of the i3 resembles something out of Level Five of Angry Birds. Journalists other than the Privileged Elite—who have already driven them—will be taking the wheel of the i3 next month in Amsterdam, so we’ll know soon enough whether our impressions are the same as those of the Privileged Snots. Having been in the back seat of an i3 during an impromptu stoplight Grand Prix a month ago, I am not worried: the little nerd will give a Prius a serious wedgie—and that’s what all this eco-passion comes down to, isn’t? I’m saving the planet—but I’m also kicking your butt.—Satch Carlson
