Insane Fact Of The Day: BMW’s First Production Electric Car Was Also Its Last Naturally Aspirated Car

The Autopian writes about the BMW i3 a lot. That’s not terribly surprising, seeing as how our very own David Tracy has owned several. I don’t blame him; the i3 is an excellent vehicle that was way ahead of its time in the extended-range electric vehicle space.

Available either as a pure EV or with an optional ICE range extender, the i3 set the benchmark for weird, efficient city cars in America for nearly a decade. It looked unlike anything else on the road, and these days, thanks to the beauty of depreciation, you can pick up used, good-running examples from Facebook Marketplace for under $10,000.

That optional range-extender engine isn’t anything special—it’s essentially a two-cylinder motorcycle engine mounted under the trunk. The i3 could be optioned with it until it died in 2022. Hilariously, that means the i3—BMW’s first real foray into the electric car space—was the last production BMW to have a naturally aspirated engine.

Wait, Really?

I first came across this piece of cursed knowledge while browsing my favorite Facebook Group, Oppositelock, where user Eric Wright pointed it out. When I first read it, I thought it couldn’t possibly be true. No way. I know the naturally aspirated inline-six, the N52 and N53, in the base-model 3- and 5-Series died in 2015. But surely there had to be a tiny naturally aspirated four-cylinder engine in Europe kicking around somewhere in BMW’s lineup.

It turns out there wasn’t. The 2.0-liter BMW N46 engine, a four-cylinder used in many of the company’s base models, was only used until 2015. After that, it was replaced by the N13, a 1.6-liter turbocharged four-cylinder borrowed from Mini.

Of course, if you want a BMW with anything bigger than six cylinders and no turbochargers, you’ll have to go even further back. The company’s last naturally aspirated V8, the S65, ended production in 2013 alongside the E9x-generation BMW M3. BMW made a V10, too, the S85, but that stopped production in 2010 when the E60-generation M5 and the E63-generation M6 went out of production. If you want a naturally aspirated V12, you have to go all the way back to 2008, with the E65-generation BMW 7 Series (though interestingly, Rolls-Royce used the same N/A V12 in the Phantom up until 2016).

The Ultimate Energy-Creation Machine

The funniest part about all of this is that the i3’s range extender is barely even a BMW engine. It was designed by BMW, sure, but it was manufactured by Kymco, a Taiwanese motorcycle builder that supplies BMW Motorrad with engines for motorcycles like the G450X, and for scooters like the C 650GT and the C 600 Sport.

According to InsideEVs, the i3’s range extender was, in fact, based on the C 650’s 647-cc parallel twin. In that application, it made 60 horsepower at 7500 rpm, but was limited to just 35 horsepower for use as a range extender (presumably, engineers wanted to keep the rpms down to cut noise, vibration, and harshness coming from the engine).

I’m almost positive BMW never realized the i3 was the last car it sold with a naturally aspirated engine. Otherwise, it might’ve done a run of special edition models towards the end of production in 2022 as a proper sendoff (at least, I hope it would’ve). Maybe one day the company will come out with some extreme, limited-production sports car with a naturally aspirated engine. But until then, the i3 will always have that extremely specific honor.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com