Just a touch more than three years after it first hit the market in Germany, we found BMW's once revolutionary i8 hybrid to be in a rather tight spot. While the Bavarians' halo sports car still has the looks and the driving characteristics that made it special at its debut, technology has certainly moved on. Today, performance EVs offer more speed with vastly improved range; in the world of hybrids, we have the Acura NSX. And what Honda has cooked up is a proper supercar priced not a whole lot higher than an i8 Coupe.

For the 2019 model year, BMW's answer seems to be the following: Please forget the roof, and here's 12 more horsepower and up to 3 miles of additional pure electric range.

BMW

More precisely, the new i8 Roadster comes with an electric soft top that opens in under 16 seconds at up to 31 mph, folding away in three segments stacked into a flattened Z. BMW used a new 3D printing process in order to come up with the geometric aluminum elements connecting the roof mechanism to the body.

The resulting space between the roof box and the seats is around 3.5 square feet, while the rear cargo area can hold 4.7 square feet of your BMW i8 cargo area-shaped objects. Opening the roof raises the rear window automatically by around 1.9 inches, but the driver can also adjust the height at the touch of a button.

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When it comes to the combination of the 1.5 three-cylinder turbo powering the rear and the electric motor driving the front wheels, we're looking at a total output of 369 horsepower, combined with a larger capacity battery pack for a pure electric range of 18 miles, on a nice day.

These numbers mean that while Elon Musk's new Tesla Roadster can promise a 0-60 run in 1.9 seconds, the i8 family remains on the conservative side with a time of 4.2 seconds for the Coupe, and 4.4 for the Roadster.

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BMW made the 2019 i8 greener than the current one by putting a bigger emphasis on pure electric drive. The automaker claims the number of driving situations where the electric motor is solely responsible for powering the car has been significantly increased, with the combustion engine only being brought into play when accelerating hard. Having said that, at 18 miles instead of 15, the maximum electric range is only mildly improved.

Perhaps more importantly though, the battery pack's capacity is up from 20 to 34 Ah, with the gross energy capacity going from 7.1 to 11.6 kilowatt hours. That's where the 12 hp increase comes from, accompanied by 184 lb-ft of instantly available electric torque.

Using a dedicated BMW i Charging Station which can supply 7.2 kW of power to charge the high-voltage, the 2019 i8s can be fully charged in under three hours.

BMW

BMW says even the 1.5-liter turbo engine's sound has been improved, while both the Coupe and the Roadster are capable of reaching speeds of up to 65 mph purely on electric power. Top speed remains limited at 155 mph in true German fashion.

The unladen weight of the i8 Roadster stands at 3513 lbs., making it some 132 lbs. heavier than the Coupe. To make the soft top possible, BMW had to come up with a new design for its frameless gullwing doors, which are made of CFRP, just like the entire windscreen frame and body panels including the side skirts with their extra-large cross-sections.

BMW

The 2019 BMW i8 is a great car made better, available in roadster form for the first time. And it sure looks tempting in this new hue, called E-Copper. A paint color name that finally makes sense. We can't wait to drive it.

Brian Williams

Brian Williams

BMW

BMW

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