Advertisement
BBC TopGear
BBC TopGear
We're changing how you comment on TopGear.com
Find out more
Paris Motor Show

BMW collaborates with Garage Italia for special i8 and i3

Italian design house teams up with BMW to create 'CrossFade Edition' i cars

Published: 04 Oct 2016

Earlier this year BMW collaborated with Lapo Elkann's Garage Italia Customs to design an i8 inspired by Giacomo Balla’s “Lampada ad Arco”. What resulted was the rather excellent i8 Futurism Edition – an i8 of many colours that was supposed to replicate the light cast by a “street lamp under moonlight”. The pair’s latest collaborations aren’t quite as bright, but look closely and you’ll see they’re as, if not more, intricate… 

These are the i3 and i8 Garage Italia CrossFade. Revealed at the Paris Motor Show last week, the CrossFades are inspired by something called optical colour mixing, an artistic technique that emerged as part of the Pointillism movement in the 19th century. It involves using small dashes of colour to create a kind-of fade effect, in this case between blue and grey. Creating it involved first painting the pair in ‘Protonic Blue’, before applying a stencil and going over them again in ‘Protonic Dark Silver’. The pattern is replicated on their Alcantara-trimmed insides, too. 

Advertisement - Page continues below

Quite cool, no?

Advertisement - Page continues below

Top Gear
Newsletter

Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.

More from Top Gear

Loading
See more on BMW

Subscribe to the Top Gear Newsletter

Get all the latest news, reviews and exclusives, direct to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, you agree to receive news, promotions and offers by email from Top Gear and BBC Studios. Your information will be used in accordance with our privacy policy.

BBC TopGear

Try BBC Top Gear Magazine

subscribe