While a long time, five years doesn't sound excessively long to develop an entire new model, distinct from an upgrade to one of the existing lineups. As an example, look at the amount of time the Tesla Model 3 was in development and still remaining until the first deliveries.

Not defending BMW; they seem to have missed the boat in this iteration. Perhaps they'll be able to find their way, but they'll have to play catch-up for a while.

The i8 (the second i-line car) was released in june 2014, which means that it'd be 6 years between the i8 and a third car. There were 4 years between the Tesla Roadster and Model S, 3 between Model S and Model X and probably 2-3 between Model X and Model 3.

If the next car in the i-line is planned for 2020, I understand that these 'young people' think it's slow. And it's obvious that it isn't a priority for BMW.

So I'm not clear if their complaint was slow model development cycles or new models coming to market. One is, it takes us too long to go from idea to off the line, the other is we don't have enough new car ideas.

hey, playing catch-up worked for Nokia, right?

> That's 5+ years for a new model. It's say that is pretty damn slow for car manufacturers that tend to release a model upgrade per year.

The automotive industry has notoriously long lead times. The second sentence does not contradict the first: they release yearly model upgrades, but each upgrade takes 5 years (more or less) to develop. In other words, 2018 models are pretty much finalized today

Isn't it <4 years?

Retail deliveries for the i8 started in June 2014, so presumably they had been working on a new version for two years already; unless the team was diluted to provide insight to their other teams for BMW's iPerformance effort to include technology from their i vehicles to hybrid variants of older series.

Does "launch" have a specific meaning in this context, that it's always the announcement of the final design, or the first showing at Frankfurt, or when it hits dealers?

> damn slow for car manufacturers that tend to release a model upgrade per year

That's not true. There are facelifts every few years and new models take a few more years. And even new models are often based on the older model in many ways.

The iPhone took 3 years to develop, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

Engineering the first iPhone is a completely different kind of challenge to engineering an EV - probably a lot easier in most ways that matter.

For the iPhone, it was a relatively fresh niche, so the minimum quality bar was very low (and considering how much better smartphones have gotten, you could argue that early models intentionally left a lot of room to improve). EV cars need to compete not only with "normal" cars, but also with generations of tesla's, and a wide variety of hybrids, including plug-ins that can to some extent provide the same benefits. A new entry needs to be much more competitive.

Then, the ingredients to a smartphone are fairly simple, and it doesn't actually matter that much exactly what you do with them. Anything vaguely affordable with a touchscreen and internet essentially works - and without much competition that means there would have been many paths to success. By contrast, there are quite a few physical limits cars run up against that make the details a lot more relevant (perhaps not if you'd have been developing the first car, but well...)

Cars have lots of regulatory issues and there is extensive safety testing. Even if this were trivial, it's likely still time consuming and may involve many iterations.

Totally different beasts.

There is very little value in comparing the iPhone to an electric vehicle. Cars have more regulations (safety, emissions), more moving parts, larger teams working on them and cost 2 orders of magnitude more. A poorly designed phone is less likely to kill people.