Design Essay: Could the Electric Revolution save the Sports Car?

CDN_01_BMW Z4

Could the flexibility, modularity and lower production costs of electric vehicle platforms be the sports car’s unlikely saviour?

“The future is uncertain, and the end is always near…” Those lyrics sung by the Doors too many years ago may today be used to describe the sports car genre’s trajectory. Sales of open two-seaters in Europe and the USA, their traditional markets, have never recovered from the devastating blow of the recession: even sales of perennial favourites like Mazda’s MX-5 are still well below 2007 levels. BMW Z4 sales between 2016 and 2018 looked like a rounding error on the company’s charts, and Munich execs are on record saying the newly-launched ‘G29’ generation is going to be the last.

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