It’s important not to underestimate how difficult a task is – reinventing the wheel or finding a way to remove a teenager from a smartphone would be comparable in this case – before we get overly critical about the end result.
BMW’s i4 could well be the first car to give the long-held hegemony of Tesla’s Model 3 a good shake by producing a properly Germanic, attractive and sporty four-door EV sedan that’s involving and exciting to drive. The problem is that BMW might, arguably, have stuffed up the whole thing by making its otherwise wonderful electric vehicle sound like a remix of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind soundtrack.
Obviously, replacing the thrilling, growling sounds that BMW’s internal-combustion cars have always made with entirely fake noises created by people in sound studios was going to be difficult to the point of contentious, and in our week together I tested the BMW’s “Iconic Sounds” on various people, of all ages. I can thus report that more than half of those surveyed hated the space-ship symphonies coming out of the BMW i4 every time you accelerate, or decelerate. My 10-year-old daughter couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed how much it sounded like a time machine, while some grown adults – all of them big Star Wars fans, incidentally – absolutely loved the synthetic symphonies.
At the recharging station
The film references are apt because BMW paid the legendary movie-theme musician Hans Zimmer an undisclosed fortune to come up with its EV sounds, from the trilling start-up hum to the “she cannae take any more, skipper, she’s gin tae blow!” shouting as your speed rises.
I got to meet Zimmer a few years ago in his Santa Monica studio, undoubtedly the coolest room I’ve ever stood in, with his Oscar for The Lion King tucked in a corner, and I can attest that he was a huge car fan who took the job very seriously indeed. But with the i4 he was on a hiding to nothing, and I do suspect he may have been running late for the deadline and just took his work from Blade Runner 2049 and handed that to BMW instead.
Personally, I’ll admit the zooms, whooshes, hums and bloops grew on me as the week went on, but then I’ve always been a bit of a nerd (to the point where I wrestled with asking Zimmer whether he felt like Antonio Salieri next to the Mozart of film-score composers, John Williams).
I don’t want to suggest that the noises define the i4 entirely, and you can turn them down by choosing Comfort mode or up by selecting Sport Boost (I later discovered there is a way to turn them off entirely), but I tended to stay in the noisy Sport mode most of the time, because it was so much fun, and that made the soundtrack part of the experience.
The good news is that everything else about the i4 feels properly premium and bravura BMW, which means it has fantastic, meaty steering, a lovely handling balance, the ability to corner like a proper German sports car and exciting amounts of acceleration. Arguably, with its low centre of gravity thanks to the big batteries under the floor, it handles even better than a normal 4 Series. The sporty i4 M50 variant I drove can hit 100km/h in 3.9 seconds – and that acceleration is always available at any speed, waiting to kick you in the spine.
This car is, in many ways, the European answer to Tesla I expected to arrive years ago, but one that has been worth waiting for.
Unfortunately, however, a Tesla Model 3, which starts at $65,500, has BMW well and truly beaten on price because this car costs a whopping $124,900. (To be fair, you’d compare the i4 M50 I drove with the Model 3 Performance variant, and that starts at $95k.)
The other downside is that, like too many BMWs I’ve driven, it seems to suffer from the kind of technical fritz-outs that suggest there’s some kind of cold war going on between the engineers in Munich and the folks at Apple. CarPlay either doesn’t work half the time, is too difficult to connect to on a daily basis, or simply disappears entirely just as you’re trying to answer a call.
From the side
Considering that BMW has clearly aped Mercedes with this car by turning its dash layout into one giant screen, this seems a real shame, because the real estate is there to make its infotainment system look impressive if only it would work all the time.
In terms of range, you’re better off going for the entry-level eDrive40 ($99,900), which gives you up to 520km, while the extra performance punch of the M50 (it has a motor on each axle, rather than just one) cuts that back to 465km.
The i4 is equipped with an 84kWh lithium-ion battery, which you can charge for free at any Chargefox station (the car comes with a free five-year subscription). Find one of Chargefox’s 200kW fast chargers and it will go from 10 to 80 per cent charge in just 31 minutes.
It really is a shame the i4 is so expensive, because it’s a genuinely fantastic EV to drive. BMW has done a good job of adapting an existing car in its range – the excellent 4 Series – and electrifying it, and it certainly bodes well for what it will be able to do with a performance electric car designed from a clean sheet of paper.
Hopefully there’ll be some new choices of fake noises, too.
BMW i4 M50
ENGINE: Dual current excited synchronous motors (400kW/795Nm). Average 25.6 kWh per 100km
TRANSMISSION: 1-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
PRICE: $124,900
STARS: 4 out of 5