We’ve seen the car already, but under a sheet. It’s a low four-door saloon with a fastback. To be clear, it’s not the iNEXT, which is the crossover-shaped car BMW will launch in 2021 as its spearhead for autonomous driving.
Instead the ‘i5’ is a more mainstream car. Why has BMW taken so many years to launch what is in effect a Tesla Model 3 or Model S rival? BMW R&D chief Klaus Fröhlich simply says BMW wants to make money on the enterprise.
After all his company has been making electric cars since the Mini e back in 2009, and the new car will have BMW’s fifth generation of battery and motor.
That gives it, he says, a range of 700km (440-odd miles) on the realistic WLTP drive cycle, or “at least 800km” on today’s hopelessly optimistic test.
The ‘i5’ design, says Fröhlich, is strongly influenced by the Vision Next 100 concept from 2016 (pictured above). He mentions the story of the i8. Originally there was a pure concept with no production intention, called Vision EfficientDynamics. The bosses were so impressed they wanted to get it into production, and so the engineers strained every sinew to turn it into what we now call the i8.
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