The driver of this since-totalled BMW i8 fortunately escaped unharmed from this fiery incident.
Those travelling along the KESAS highway last Friday (27th September) may have felt a little bit hotter than normal, as a BMW i8 had spontaneously combusted en route near the Sri Petaling LRT station.
According to news reports regarding this incident, the Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department received an emergency call at 12.17 p.m. regarding this incident. A team from the Bukit Jalil fire station was promptly dispatched to the scene, with the blaze eventually put out within 12 minutes of their arrival, at 12.39 p.m.
Fortunately, the driver of this hybrid sports car managed to escape this fiery incident unscathed. The i8 itself however wasn’t so lucky, as it was deemed by the fire department to be fully destroyed by the blaze.
It was reported on Friday that the cause of this hybrid sports car’s spontaneous combustion is still currently under investigation by the Fire Department’s forensics unit, with there being no update regarding this matter thus far. And for what it is worth here, while battery fires are the hot (pardon the pun) topic these days, please do also recall that there is an equal chance that the cause of this blaze could have originated from ICE side of things too.
The BMW i8 was first launched internationally in 2014, before officially landing locally in 2015. This PHEV sports car packed a MINI-derived turbocharged three-pot and a hybrid synchronous motor paired to a 7.1 kWh lithium-ion battery, for a combined power and torque output of 374 PS and 570 Nm in its most potent form.
This PHEV powertrain combination was sufficient to squirt the i8 from 0-100 km/h in under 4.5 seconds, before eventually topping out at a very Germanic 250 km/h. In EV mode meanwhile, this BMW sports car can travel up to an NEDC-rated 55 km before its engine requires to be fired up.
Though perhaps more interesting and impressive however than the i8’s PHEV powertrain was for it to feature a carbon fibre tub, where a set of butterfly doors were then tacked onto it to complete what is arguably the prettiest BMW to have come out in the past decade.
One final interesting thing to note here regarding the i8 is that with a total of 20,465 examples (16,581 coupes and 3,884 roadsters) produced over its six-year production span ending in June 2020, this BMW was incidentally (and still is actually) the world’s best-selling PHEV sports car.
