Occasionally see one of those parked around SF -- pictures and video don't do it justice.

The i8 looks great, but it's a low-performance car in all-electric mode. And a slow seller -- 32 sold in the USA in January.

Wikipedia said its the top selling car in it's category:

> Global sales since mid-2014 totaled more than 10,000 BMW i8s by early November 2016, making the i8 the world's top selling plug-in electrified sports car. The top selling markets are the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

It looks amazing, but there is no real reason to buy it. If I had a few more million I would still do it :-)

Saw a matte black one in San Mateo recently, OMG so gorgeous.

How do you know the exact number sold nationwide last month?

(I'd think the company would not release exact low figures)

BMW actually puts out a press release every month detailing the exact number of cars it sold in the preceding month broken down by model: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/usa/article/attachment/T02776...

Other manufacturers do similar things.

This is pretty surprising. What do they get out of doing this? It's competitively valuable market information but I don't see why customers would benefit from knowing the exact numbers - so I don't get why they do this.

Investors expect this information so if they stopped it would be assumed they were hiding bad numbers. Further the information will trickle out in the form of car registration statistics anyways so they aren't giving you anything you couldn't get elsewhere.

There's a few places that keep track of this data, http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/bmw/bmw-i8/ for one. I have seen sales figures for most brands shown publicly, so I don't think it's something they keep to themselves.