BMW is one of those car companies that has a little bit of everything for everyone. No matter if you want style, space, comfort or speed—or all of the above—you know that the quality German engineering is going to give you something great. What the current BMW lineup doesn’t really have at this point, however, is a proper supercar. Their last car that can be considered a supercar was the plug-in hybrid i8, which BMW ended production for in 2020. The i8 was sleek and beautiful with butterfly doors and an engine that could take you to 62 mph in 4.4 seconds. And though the i9 isn’t around anymore (though maybe it will be back) there were also plans for a rip-roaring successor to the i9 that got killed by Covid.
The BMW i16: A Supercar We Wish We Could Have Driven
When it comes to BMW concepts, it’s never really just one car. The i16 was slated to be a sort of successor to the i8—as Goodwood helpfully points out “i16 is i8 2, get it?” The concept images of the car were originally released to the public via Domagoj Dukec, BMW’s head of design. The car was immediately compared to the images released of BMW’s 2019 Vision M Next concept which BMW claimed was their view of “how driving pleasure might look in the future.”
But it wasn’t just the Vision M Concept. According to Dukec, it only took 12 months for the car to be ready “inside and out.” The i16 borrowed heavily from its predecessor the i8, using the previous car’s “composite scructure” to get a lot of the heavy lifting out of the way before the design phase took over.
A BMW Supercar Your Teenaged Self Would Drool Over
Both the i16 and Vision M Next concept share a low and sleek body type that would look right at home next to any 1990s Lambo poster on a teenage boy’s bedroom wall. There are huge intake channels to manage airflow and a violent pop of color in the red-orange detailing along the rear of both of the cars. And though the Vision M Next was always supposed to be just a concept, the i16 was the Vision M Next perfected and headed towards production.
Though the i16 ended up being yet another victim of the Covid pandemic, we can’t help but speculate as to what it could have really been like to drive. We assume that there were engine tweaks from the Vision M Next concept, we can use that as a basline for the engine that wasn’t. The Vision M Next had a 591 horsepower turbo engine that—as the “i” in the name suggests—was paired with a plug-in-hybrid system. It was supposed to have a 62-mph time of 3.0 seconds and a top speed of 186 mph, and we imagine the i16 would have been somewhere in the same ballpark.
Import car maintenance shops everywhere can hold a moment of silence for the i16. Though we may never get to experience her angular beauty in real life, here’s to hoping that BMW soon has a new supercar for us down the line.
