The latest BMW concept cars were shown last Wednesday, and they sport a stunning amount of auto glass. The doors panels on both the BMW i3 and BMW i8 were almost entirely out of auto glass and had no support pillars between the two sets of side doors, lending the cars a fascinatingly futuristic, transparent appeal.
The concept cars were presented at what the company called a “Special Sneak Peak” in NYC, permitting the press to sneak looks through both the cars’ revealing auto glass doors and the company’s plans for the vehicles. The two cars were presented in conjunction with speeches from their designer, Richard Kim, and the company’s manager of electric vehicle operations and strategy, Rich Steinberg. The former recounted the details of the journey whereby his team worked to create the new cars, imagining what they wanted to be a completely new BMW product out of what he described to be a departure from the traditional design process for BMW’s cars.
The idea, according to Kim, was to revolve around the concept of “stream flow”. The cars’ smoothly sloping surfaces, combined with the sweeping lines from the front to the end of each vehicle and the wide surfaces of auto glass, all combined to represent a sense of open-air, wind-tunnel-located transport.
As for the manager of electric vehicle operations at BMW, he spoke of the improvements the new design had made to the overall comfort and capacity of passengers. It was emphasized that both cars were designed specifically with the future of electric fuel for vehicles in mind. One of the cars is hybrid and the other is electric. The i3 is the “city car”, with the i8 being dubbed a “sports car”. Both make use of large amounts of carbon fiber—the same material that is actually used extensively by the aerospace industry, as a matter of fact.
The carbon fiber was selected, according to the presenters, due to its powerful strength despite its lightness. This means that fuel efficiency is drastically improved for both vehicles, as both of them are going to be lighter than most other cars on the market today. The two cars are going to be going into production in perhaps the next three years, the presenters said. No prices have been quoted just yet, although people may probably look forward to seeing fairly high prices for both vehicles: carbon fiber is not exactly known for being inexpensive.
The carbon fiber is also what permitted the engineers to dedicate so much real estate on the car’s surfaces to auto glass. Without the stability and lightweight durability of the carbon fiber, it would have been difficult to craft glass winged doors of the type that the cars sport.
