BMW came stunningly close to releasing an i8-based, M1-inspired supercar about two years ago. Known as the i16, the electrified coupe was at an advanced stage of its development process when it was canceled. The company cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason for not bringing the i16 to production, but a recent interview brought to light another explanation: the model competed against the XM for resources in BMW’s performance division, and lost.
Speaking to Joe Achilles, author Steve Saxty explained the i16 project was about 95% ready for production. “All of the surfaces are mature, as opposed to cartoon-like, and [BMW had] done much more than that beneath the surface; they’ve done body engineering as well,” he revealed.
It likely helped that the i16—a name that wouldn’t have necessarily made the leap to production—was based on a familiar architecture. “The idea of this car would have been to take the basics of [the] i8 … and putting a four-cylinder, not a three-cylinder,” Saxty noted. It sounds like the coupe would have used a plug-in hybrid drivetrain rated at about 560 horsepower, a generous bump over the i8’s 369-hp rating.
BMW worked on the i16 project during the COVID-19 pandemic and tentatively planned to release the car in 2022. Fast-forward to 2024, however, and the i8 still hasn’t been replaced. What gives? According to Saxty, the brand canned the coupe in favor of a more controversial model—one that may not stick around much longer, according to rumors.
“They just had to make a decision of, ‘do we go with that or XM?’,” he revealed. We can hear you screaming “traitors!” from here, but keep in mind BMW is a business whose cars need to make money. Saxty brings up a good point: “Wherever your head is on XM, there’s value in the market in high-end expensive SUVs.” He then floats a second good point: “What price point does BMW as a sports car brand go with a four-cylinder car?”
So why not put, say, the M5’s V8 in the back? Or even the M3’s straight-six; the M1 used a 3.5-liter six-cylinder, after all. It’s not like there’s a shortage of exciting, large-displacement engines in the BMW portfolio. Your guess is as good as ours—Saxty didn’t answer that question during the interview—but we’d wager ever-stricter emissions regulations and the i8-derived platform made some degree of electrification mandatory.
If you’ve got 50 minutes to kill, the interview is fascinating and well worth listening to. If not, the part about the i16 starts about 40 minutes in.
As for the M1’s successor, it doesn’t sound like it’s currently in BMW’s product pipeline. The idea of replacing the coupe isn’t new: BMW toyed around with the idea of making a follow-up in 1988, so about seven years after the M1 retired, and it has experimented with supercars several times since. The M1 Hommage concept unveiled at the 2008 edition of the Villa d’Este Concours d’Elegance was clearly inspired by the M1, but it remained at the prototype stage. Will we ever see a modern M1? Perhaps. “Every day at BMW, someone is designing a new M1,” Saxty told Achilles.
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