Well, it was an epic cluster&#@$ 13 months between putting a deposit down on the announcement day at Frankfurt 2013 and delivery in Oct. 2014 followed by a pretty great 6 months of ownership, but I finally decided to sell the i8.
I'll be doing a writeup for Jalopnik soon but the basic gist was that I had almost got so fed up with the whole order process, lack of communication, missed estimated release dates, etc. I was almost ready to give up on the i8 completely in July last year. The following announcements of better-spec i8s, anniversary editions, lack of expected features, doubling production, etc. only made it worse.
Let's get it straight that everything about the car itself was amazing, everything around it was abysmal. The worst, BY FAR, was the attention and how oppressive and ridiculous it was. It was WAY rarer to walk out to no one around the car than it was to people constantly taking pictures, gathering around it, talking and waiting for me (the owner) to come back. I took it to a cars and coffee with 400-500 cars (including Aventadors, 458 Speciales, etc) and it had a crowd so thick you couldn't take pictures of the car. Cars would literally make circles around the car on the interstate to take pictures, even forcing me into other lanes to get better shots. People would step out in front of me and wave me down as I was leaving places to ask questions, if I could pull over to let them take pictures, if they could sit in it or take a ride. The gap in attention between my Fiesta and the SLS was smaller than the gap in attention between the SLS and the i8. If you are the least bit Introverted, YOU WILL BE MISERABLE IN AN i8. Then there's getting out, which makes getting out of my SLS feel as easy as falling out of a ladder, it was a pain to both hoist out, lean left, and duck basically turning egress into a controlled fall backwards.
Then there's residuals. With the way BMW appears to want to pimp out the i8 chassis and platform for other cars, the increase in production, etc. means that the uniqueness will evaporate quickly. And with their production goals, you will be more likely to see an i8 than a new M6 on the road. Seemed like a good time to get out while the getting was good. I'll probably be back to buy one near the end, maybe a i8s. By then hopefully I can order it with the black interior I wanted to begin with but was forced not to. The keyless entry they added 6-months into production. The displaykey they said would be available at launch. The conspicuously missing blindspot detection, adaptive cruise/collision avoidance, and a litany of other features it should have had from the start that they'll probably add via feature creep like Apple does. And with their build numbers, I might even get one for under sticker by then.
Again, the i8 is a great car, destined to be a landmark in design and engineering...but everything leading up to it launch and following has been an amazing mess.
I'm not sure but it might have been the highest mileage i8 in the country when I sold it, at least one of the highest at 5080 miles.