I've counted to 10 and ready to talk about the BMW i3

The last few nights went by without much sleep. I'm starting to feel it now, so if I start sounding drunk in a bit, you know why. I can't blame BMW for my insomnia though. To be fair, the new i3 Neue Klasse barely held a place in my mind since its launch this Wednesday. Not because I didn't want it to, I just was a bit too busy to sit down and have a good hard look.

Just before I started writing this, I took a few minutes to just sit down and look at some pictures. I found that a quick glance doesn't do this car justice at all (most cars need a bit more time, to be honest). When I saw the car on Wednesday, my first thoughts were mostly centered around "this kind of boring and safe". And I still stand by that. I looks good, but not as sporty as I was hoping it to be. Mostly because the concept version was a bit more aggressive, while still being perfectly understated. The final product is a bit less rough around the edges. A bit easier on the eye of most people. Which I'm not, I've found after a bit over 40 years on this earth.

And it makes sense. It can't be too out there. It's going to be the back bone of the company. It's what BMW is going to be in the future and needs to appeal to not only me. And there also needs to be room for the full blown Mi3/i3M (?). That has to blow this thing out of the water first try. It needs space for a bit of contrast.

But there was one thing that caught my eye straight away. One thing that, in combination with the word 'optional' in the press release make no sense to me at all. It's the illuminated kidney's. Or the kidneys that surround the headlights? Does the new I3 have four kidneys? Or just two? I don't really know anymore.

Let me explain: If you look at the car head on, you see the light bar going around the headlights. So the most outer one. If you take the left and right ones, you could see that as the biggest kidney's BMW has ever fitted to a BMW. Even bigger than the coke snorting nostrils on the 7 Series. But look inside those those two bubbles, and you find a couple of L-shaped things. It's easy to make them out to be the new kidney's of the i3. I did at first. But when I read 'optional', my mind went all over the place.

Also because it looks to have a booger hanging out of its nose. Warning: can't unsee. Look at the camera in the upper left corner of the right kidney. Sorry.

The lighting on the grille is optional. Without it, it'll be a big black piece of shiny plastic on which it's hard to make out the L-shapes. So if you're not opting for lights, you'll have huge black holes on the front of you're brand spanking new i3. That's going to look bad. And you know it. And BMW knows it. But Ze Zermans also probably know you know, so they know you'll take the 500 euro option. Even if it's only to not make the residual value of the car take a nosedive when it's driven out of the dealership.

Let's take this a step further. Just for fun, which the Germans don't have, so it'll make this even less funny than it already is. If you take the amount of ordered iX3's until now (which the i3 will undoubtedly match) and multiply that by 500, you get 25 million euro's in easy money.

But we have to be fair here. It's the German way of selling cars. When you buy a Volkswagen, BMW or Mercedes, you get four wheels, some doors and hopefully a windshield. Everything else is optional. And when you strip down the options on the interior, which all brands are doing, you need to find options elsewhere. Smart play, BMW, smart play.

In other news:

WAIT WHAT? Newey out, Wheatley in? After just four months it looks like Newey is stepping down from all his roles at Aston Martin. A shocking development, which looks to be smoothed over by Drive To Survive good guy Jonathan Wheatley, who currently leads (and probably cuddles) the Audi F1 team. According to Motorsport he's the one who's taking the wheel at Aston Martin. Nothing is clear yet, only just rumours. (I'm trying so hard to not make the obvious puns here, my hands are shaking so hard that I'm losing feeling in my fingers).

Talking about the BMW i3 again. It needs to come in a Touring quick. That thing looks way better than the sedan.

Things just clicked. I know why the smaller car companies jump on the opportunity to get robotaxi's on the road. It's not about the robotaxi stuff at all. It's about visibility, getting butts in seats and even more about money. The latest example is Uber which is investing 1.25 billion dollhairs into Rivian to get to use 50.000 R2's as robotaxi's. It's money Rivian kinda needs right now. Lucid did exactly the same thing with the Gravity. I'm kind of ashamed it took me this long to find this out... Maybe I need to be sleep drunk more often.