The i3 is a fascinating little hatchback. Following the often-forgotten, low-production 1 Series ActiveE, it was the BMW brand’s first real foray into the electric car space, with floor-mounted batteries, a carbon fiber monocoque, and rear-wheel drive. The i3 was sold as an EREV (extended-range electric vehicle), too, with some trims offered with a bike engine in the trunk area to recharge the battery.
Though its looks have never really grown on me, I appreciate the i3’s quirkiness. Those pencil-thin tires and rear-hinged back doors make the car incredibly charming, as do the very low prices for used models on Facebook Marketplace (you can easily buy a nice i3 for under 10 grand these days). Our very own David Tracy had one for a couple of years and called it one of the greatest cars he’s ever owned.
Because i3s are so cheap on the used market, I was fairly shocked to see BMW had actually sold one new example sometime in the third quarter of 2025. As a reminder, the i3 has been out of production since 2022 and hasn’t been sold new in the United States since 2021. That means the i3 in question has likely been sitting on a dealer lot for years.
At face value, a purchase like this makes no sense at all. Before the i3 left production, it had a starting MSRP of $45,445. But used models with the same battery size and under 20,000 miles on the clock could be had for half that price, or cheaper. So why buy new? Well, it’s entirely possible that whichever dealer had this i3 in stock heavily discounted the car to move it off the lot—it’s tough to know for sure without info from the dealer or the buyer (a BMW spokesperson couldn’t provide any additional info when I reached out via email).
The singular i3 wasn’t the only zombie car to find a new owner at BMW. Someone also bought a single 6 Series sometime in the last three months. That car has been out of sale in the U.S. even longer, having last been offered for the 2019 model year in an unsightly Gran Turismo hatchback form (BMW sold this car for a few more years overseas, but it was eventually discontinued globally in 2023).
Weirdly, this buy makes a bit more sense. The internet loves to hate on the 5 and 6 Series Gran Turismos, and they didn’t sell well. As a result, they’re incredibly rare cars (there are only 41 used examples for sale nationwide on Cars.com right now). So it’s possible someone just wanted to snag one of the last new models available, rather than going used. Of course, this is just speculation. It’s equally possible that whichever dealer had this 6 Series GT simply pawned it off to a growing family looking for a big hatchback to move their 2.5 kids around.
BMW couldn’t tell me whether this i3 and 6 Series were the last such new examples sitting on dealer lots, so we might very well see more zombie cars appear as time goes on.
If you were the buyer of either of these cars, please reach out to me. I have several questions. How do you find it? Was the dealer local to you? Did your salesperson give you a sweet discount for taking it off their hands? Or was it just like any other sale to them? Was the car actually new, or did it have some miles on the clock? The world needs to know. These are the most important questions of our time.
Top graphic image: BMW
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I hacked into the DMV’s computer and found it was registered to Tracy David of Tarzana, CA.
This entire comment thread is very disappointing.
For me, that is. Because I was late to this thread and all the good David Tracy jokes have been taken
Hey you need to flush a turd you flush a turd even if you have to flush twice.
It’s in David’s kitchen. He’s using it for a parts car.
I rode in one of these when the local BMW dealership maybe eight or nine years ago gave me a ride home while the X5 was in the shop (again). It was interesting, but I’d never buy one.
Release the i3 files!!
Can I just say how awesome it is that over half the comments are saying it was David? We have great community.
I should also say that the silence from one Mr. Tracy in all of this has become deafening.
Now we know why David is buying and building an old jeep: as a shell to hide this new purchase. Probably could hide it in one of the boxes.
I’d actually like to see, instead of which cars have been sold, where these new but old unsold cars are. You’d think The Autopian would be a great place to advertise these for sale. Bunch of weirdos here. No offense.
Couldn’t find who bought it, but this might be where it was bought from:
New BMW i3 in Fort Worth
The 2017 BMW i3 – on sale at Autobahn BMW Fort Worth – travels up to 150 miles per charge with Range Extender, and brags LED headlights, an iDrive display, …
Sorry, the link was broken…
My question would be “Dear God why?”.
The appeal of these goofy science experiments is lost on me – and yes, I have driven a couple.
Next week, we’ll see an article here by David entitled “I Just Bought the Last Ever i3 and I Have 6 Weeks to Transform It Into a Moab Rock Crawler”
Tavid Dracy strikes again.
David had “one” i3? I am picturing Brian calling David to ask if he was the buyer:
“I just saw a report that a new i3 sold last quarter. Weird right? You are a big fan of the i3 aren’t you?”
“I had one, sure. But that was YEARS ago! What are you accusing me of? I don’t have to answer your questions. You are not going to mention this i3 sale to Elise, are you?”
(Everyone pointedly NOT looking at David Tracy) “Yeah, I wonder who would have bought this?”
“Why I sold my Holy Grail i3 for an even Holier Grailier i3”
I still love the i3, even though I’ve never owned one myself. I’ve driven several, and helped friends/neighbors buy at least three. I can’t help but wonder what was paid for this zombie/new i3, and of course I’m curious as to whether it just sat unplugged at the dealership for 2-3 years, or if it got plugged in occassionally/the battery health was checked before purchase.
A guy I know had one of those 5-series hatchbacks and a headlight went out. It cost over two thousand dollars to have the assembly replaced. This for a car that was just several years old. If I had to pay $2,300+ for a headlight in a car that still smelled new, I would not be happy about it at all.
I’ve got to wonder whether some of these zombie new car sales happen after a sales manager or someone like that was allowed personal use of a dealer demo car and they ended up liking it enough to use it for a while. Eventually they leave or a customer expresses interest in the car.
When I sold Lexus I know we had a customer buy a dealer demo car that a sales manager had driven for about a year. It was a “baby shit brown” color that 99% of customers recoiled from, but, as thy say, there’s an ass for every seat.
🙂 ‘baby shit brown’ …that’s good. 🙂
PS: of course it depends on what price was paid for this zombie i3, but I sort of wish it were me that bought it. We didn’t get the ‘home run’ final edition cars in the states (AFAIK) with the matte finish metallic colors and every option. Those are my favorites of course. 🙂
A producer at a TV station I worked at coined the color “Ebola Brown,” back during one of the epidemics in Africa in the mid-90s. I felt guilty for laughing, but it was also funny.
I was the sysadmin on the newsroom computer system, and I could define colors for specific cells or status messages, and he and I blew an hour fine-tuning it. It was pretty ugly, and we changed it up after a few days and the laughter had died down.
I understand that tens of thousands of people died from it, and it’s really not funny at all. Not my shiniest moment.
From what I understand, Ebola Brown is actually a shade of dark red
The only sin in comedy is not being funny.
At its best, humour is a survival mechanism.
Didn’t Steve McQueen have a Ferrari in that color?
Of course, if I had a brown car, I’d be telling everybody that too.
My ’68 Datsun 510 was a color like that, but I was too polite to use the S word back then.
I’d take a brown Ferrari, but if it was the exact shade that Lexus ES350 was, I’d need to get a big discount from the going rate for that model.
Like, this 456 6-speed went for $60k in large part to the dark green color (which I happen to like) – I’d take it in that baby shit brown for no more than $45k. That green is worth a $15k to me.
“I just bought Delmar (NHRN) his first car”
-David Tracy, probably
Brian: I just want to talk to whoever bought this I3. WHY?!
David (pushes Jeep parts boxes in front of new I3): I hope we find whoever it is.
Hiding in plain sight
https://maps.app.goo.gl/J4MibBKVKxR9ZivDA
Just fess up, David.
Aren’t these stories usually just the dealers and manufacturers reconciling inventory errors?
Some of the leftover high dollar cars might actually have sat for a while (my Viper did), but mainstream stuff I have a hard time believing is sitting that long, or even being used as a demonstrator or dealer personal vehicle for multiple years.
The only other reason I can think of is that some dealer’s owner thought about keeping it as a “collector” but then died or thought better of it. That pops up as a reason for some extremely low-mileage classic models pop up on auction sites.
I know my BMW dealer kept the same cars as service loaners for YEARS. So that is my take on how most of these things hang around so long. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine using an i3 as a service loaner, so who knows?
The BMW dealership where I lived for a while used them as a courtesy car that would ferry you back home after dropping off a car and pick you up when the work was done. But AFAIK, they didn’t just give you the keys and let you terrorize it.
I did think the interior was kind of cool.
The i3 launched in what, 2012 or 2013? It’s now a decade old technologically, as far as what you can get in an EV. The Bosch components it’s constructed with are identical to those used in the first generation Fiat 500e. So if he paid about $5K or so for this, it would be a bargain. Otherwise, it’s like buying a computer with an Intel 486 in 2025.
But the 486 has a turbo button. 🙂
Which will actually slow it down.
Depends on the exact computer. Some were wired one way, some the other. My 486 was wired such that the button made it run at full speed, and turning turbo off sandbagged it. The turbo button lit up and everything. Pretty swish for 1993. CompuAdd’s midlevel finest.
Though the real “turbo” was finding the jumper on the motherboard that changed it from 25mhz to 33mhz – and that SX25 worked just fine as an SX33. And then a DX2/66 once I got the mighty Overdrive Processor for it. I still have that original SX25 CPU sitting in my desk drawer in Maine.
I always wired mine up backwards because I like to be pedantic. My old Compaq 386 sx25 didn’t have a jumper, but it did have a crystal, I actually found a 33MHz crystal in my dad’s stash of electronics that fit and swapped, them, found a shop with Math CoProcessors on sale for like $15. Got it a cheap VGA card, and an additional 4MB of ram, for the fastest 386 in town! My internet “speed” (a 14.4K modem) was actually faster as the computer could finally render the text as fast as it came down the phone line.
Replaced it with a Cyrix 166 about a year later.
Good Lord, you guys are aging me. I remember going from a 286 to a 486. And going from a 14.4 to 28.8K modem. And I remember paying over $500 for a 20 MB hard drive for my Fat Mac.
My first computer was a TI-99 4A, and was the last computer I didn’t build myself until I started buying laptops in the early ‘augths.
I had every generation of Intel architecture from the 8088 up to the 12th Gens, lots of Cyrix and AMD, and even a NEXT in the mix too.
Now get off my lawn!
Wow. A NeXT!
My first computer was a Burroughs 6700 with a punch card reader at UCSD.
The first one I owned was a Commodore 64.
I had a Sun box for a while. Fun to play with if you are a bit of a masochist. Also an AS/400 in my garage (not that I ever fired it up).
Strangest box I had was an UltraSprak, was a neat machine, but mostly useless for my needs.
I got into computers really late. Didn’t get my first until my last semester of undergrad, in 1993. Most of my dorky friends had them in jr high/high school, but I was too into racing bikes then to care about computers, and the bikes absorbed all my money. Then cars once I got my license.
Of course, I ended up running with the whole computer thing. Though I do wonder if I had not gotten that first computer, if I would have just ended up as a practicing attorney, rather than just having the law degree. Computers were much more interesting, and allowed me to fall into IT when I couldn’t get a legal job in the ’90s recession.
The software company I started working for in 1999 and the product I was a sysadmin on before that ran on SGI and DEC Ultrix servers. Then it was ported over to SCO Unix and eventually, RedHat Linux/CentOS. Now it runs on ubuntu, but I retired before that happened.
The i3s has a SPORT button so there!
BMW updated the tech over the years, so it’s likely 2019-ish battery tech. The interior tech is, yeah, 2012-ish, but the mechanicals pretty much all hold up today.
I drive brand new EVs all the time; the i3, aside from the simple single-screen iDrive and its lack of cameras and other computer features, still feels modern to drive. But that’s not hugely surprising given it’s an EV.
If you want to speak to the buyer, you can probably find David on Slack.
Between this and the $40k mint 2005 Wrangler David must be having a tough day resisting the sort of temptation that leads to thoughts like “which one’s easier to hide?” and “which one’s more comfortable to sleep in on the Galpin lot after Elise (nhrn) finds out?”
If it really was a sub-500 mile example – and not the dealer’s personal car that was driven thousands of miles on a dealer plate – I’d be curious to know about battery degradation from just sitting for 4+ years.
Negligible if keep above 20% and under 80% or so. There’s no difference between charge and use, and charge and sit.
Yes but that’s a big “if.” EVs have parasitic drain so someone would have to have been on top of monitoring and maintaining its SOC. it’s definitely possible, but I don’t know how likely. It’s not like back in 2021 someone said “ok, this is gonna sit here for 4 years so let’s make sure we stay on top of things.”
FWIW, when I went out of town for a month, I did some research on how best to store my Leaf. The procedure was to have it around 50% SOC and then disconnect the 12v. That cuts parasitic discharge and from what I remember, a month later the main battery was at the same SOC as when I’d left it.
Soon, on The Autopian:
“Here’s why I just bought another BMW i3, the greatest car ever!” – David Tracy
Its more likely to be David Tracey than anyone else tbh.
Stealth buyer.