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2015 BMW i8 offers you a fast ride to the future for $135,700* [w/video]

BMW's long-form teasing and rollout of its incredibly cool i8 has put us in a unique position to report from its world debut here in Frankfurt. Typically, an auto show debut marks just the start of the information dump about a new vehicle. The i8, however, is a car that we've already driven and reviewed, so perhaps the biggest news from the show floor is the official price of the thing, as well as getting to see it live and in person, of course.
Arriving in US showrooms in the spring of 2014, the i8 performance plug-in hybrid will carry a price tag of $135,700 (*not including $925 for destination and handling charges). That kind of cash puts the i8 near the very top of the BMW range (slotting just under the top-trim 7-Series models), and will buy a massive amount of new technology.
The four-seat i8 has the look of a true supercar, and its new-tech drivetrain will offer up the performance of a stirring sports car, at least. A TwinPower Turbo, three-cylinder, 1.5-liter engine will make 231 horsepower and 236 pound-feet of torque that's gets sent to the rear wheels, while a 96-kilowatt electric motor doles out 131 hp and 184 lb-ft of maximum torque to the fronts. Total system output of 362 hp and 420 lb-ft allows the i8 to sprint to 62 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds with all-wheels-driven handling, and it still returns an astonishing 94 miles per gallon US.

Toyota GT86 engineers explored shooting brake and sedan variants, are they still in the cards?

According to the Toyota UK blog, engineers for the automaker were so excited developing the GT86 coupe that they investigated producing a whole family of models based on the rear-wheel drive sports car. And at least one engineer - product chief Tetsuya Tada - still hopes it can happen, even if not everyone at Toyota is onboard. Tada: "Actually we tried to do this secretly but the executives found us out. They said: 'What are you doing? Will you please focus on the coupe.'"
Those mooted variants included both a four-door sedan and a shooting brake. Why? Aside from the pure excellence of a lightweight, brilliantly handling hatchback, Toyota was keenly aware of the fact that it may need to spread the cost of development out across several models. Tada says that's part of the reason why it was so easy to create the convertible. The company knew from the outset that a softtop version was in the cards, and built the machine's structure to accommodate having the roof sliced off.
Tada also made mention of the already-announced collaboration between Toyota and BMW. The engineer said that the GT86 was particularly helpful because it demonstrated just how successful a product conceived and designed by two different companies can be. While he didn't say exactly what Toyota and BMW are up to, it's clear the two are looking into a number of possibilities. It's an interesting read with a lot of

Gus Van Sant casts the BMW i8 in soft light

BMW has spent the better part of a century building its reputation with fossil-burning transportation, but now it's banking heavily on the success of its new i family of electric vehicles. In order to succeed, it will need to sell examples of the i3, but sell the idea with the i8. And in order to do so, it is going to need some out-of-the-box promotional thinking. And that's just what it seems to have done with this latest campaign of television commercials.
The series of three (or at least that's how many have been released thus far) ads wax more poetic than most of the car ads we've seen. But while they might skimp on the technical details, they don't skip over the talent. The videos are the work of Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant, the cinematic artist best known for films like Good Will Hunting, Milk and Finding Forrester.
Van Sant has also solicited the voices of Sam Hazeldine (Caleb from Resurrection), Sting's daughter Mickey Sumner (Sophie from Frances Ha) and Michael Pitt (Jimmy from Boardwalk Empire), but doesn't hide them behind the microphone in the recording studio. Instead they serve as the face of Bavaria's new hybrid sports car, and the results are rather stunning. See for yourself in the trio of videos below.