BMW i8 - long-term review

It’s in bits. Because of one cable. When I bought the i8 it had two easily fixable and very small faults. One: the rubber trims around the bootlid had lost their stick, so were loose and flapping. Two: the corrugated plastic gaiter that covers the wiring where it passes into the doors had cracked, exposing the wires inside.

Not ideal, but hardly a deal breaker. Surely all I needed was a new plastic gaiter to wrap around the cables and all would be good. But things don’t work like that, do they? The i8 is a one-off specialist car which means it was designed and engineered from scratch, didn’t have the trial and error enjoyed by something like a 3 Series that has been around for donkeys and had all those little gremlins exorcised.

The bootlid trim? Straightforward. Clearly someone cheap had bodged it back on once before with some silicon, but that’s an easy fix - and a well known one. “Ryan told me he’d done absolutely loads of these,” apprentice technician Katie Fearns tells me, “he’d be more surprised if he saw an i8 that didn’t need doing.”

Katie has been working on my i8 under the supervision of master technician Ryan Chapple. She’s two years into a three year apprenticeship and it’s the first one she’s ever worked on. “It’s been really interesting, for the door wires I just assumed it would be an easy shroud fix, but when I started going through the guidelines for the fix…”

Yeah, not straightforward. It’s not a matter of wrapping a new shroud around the wires and sealing it in place. Well, it could be if you’re cutting corners. Hold that thought. The shroud comes as part of the cable package, which means the entire door wiring needs to be swapped out. This isn’t the tricky bit. It’s fiddly, but straightforward. The door card clips off exposing the carbon, which has an opening covered by a replaceable waterproof membrane.

“Someone’s clearly tampered with that before, because it was held on by gaffer tape,” says Katie. “I expect they were planning on doing the shroud, then realised how much work was involved and just taped it up rather than fitting a new one. Which they’re meant to do, because it waterproofs the inner door.”

Doesn’t look like any water has made it into my door happily. But this is just the prequel. So the door electrics (for the windows, mirrors, speakers, closure warnings and releases) can be disconnected through this opening (“it’s just as well I’ve got small hands” says Katie), but at the other end, where the door wiring passes into the bulkhead and clips into a connector, that’s where the problems start.

“The front wing had to come off because the plug for the door wiring is behind it. But to get the wing off, you have to take the bumper off, and to get that off you need to get the bonnet off. And then, to access the bolts that hold the wing on, you have to take the sill off.” Hence why my car looks like it’s been stripped to the bone by piranhas.

And all this just to get to the harness to attach the new wiring. Apparently the panels all came off nice and easily, everything worked as it was meant to, but it was a nine hour job in total. Just to replace a couple of shrouds.

For Katie, it’s valuable training. I hadn’t really thought about how mechanics learn their trade, but BMW has a training academy where technicians go to learn new cars or new products, and where apprentices get extra training alongside their work in service centres. Katie goes for about a week every couple of months.

“It’s like college, but more intensive, split between classroom theory and hands on in the workshop," she says. "I really enjoy it. I got into mechanics because I didn’t want to catch the bus to sixth form, so bought a 50cc scooter and couldn’t afford to get it mended professionally, so watched YouTube to do it. Then I bought my first car and it was kind of the same situation and I had to figure it out myself. And at some point I realised I quite liked it.”

One thing led to another and next year she’ll be a fully qualified BMW technician. One that knows the inner workings of the i8's wiring loom.