Most new cars have a lifecycle thus: get conceived during a product planning meeting; get 'spied' by a snapper during development (usually wearing another car's body at first); turn up at a motor show in stunning concept form (with massive wheels, insanely hinged doors, insanely tiny wing mirrors); get production redesign (smaller wheels, normal doors/wing mirrors, less chrome, fewer LEDs); get 'production debut' (usually a year later); go into production; succeed/fail; go into corporate museum/graveyard.
Not so the BMW Simple concept, which in going straight from the design studio to the museum has basically bypassed all the middle steps. So how come? Well, the Simple is a little look - we hope - at what might become of 'Project i'. If you haven't heard, that's the name for the series of posh green city cars BMW will have on the road by around 2015. Simple is a three-wheel, two-seat tandem car from 2008 that was briefly planned for sale but was killed because BMW thought buyers wouldn't understand it.
So now it has a home in the BMW museum in Munich. The maker decided to put it there, coincidentally, on the same day it had invited a load of journos around for dinner (including Car Enthusiast) to unveil some of the technology due to appear in BMWs and MINIs shortly.
In a nutshell, Simple is powered by a 48bhp petrol engine hidden under the floor and it's capable of 0-62mph in 'under ten seconds', but returns an astonishing 140mpg because it's dead slippery and only weighs 480kg. It tilts like a motorbike, but does so using hydraulics so it's not too strenuous to operate. The boxy shape is purely wind tunnel driven - a point project leader Sebastian Schelper was keen to point out - which suggests that had it got the green light it would have looked rather more sexy than the 'cardboard cigar' it became.
The name, if you're wondering, is far cleverer than a reference to its basic shape: it's actually an acronym of 'Sustainable and Innovative Mobility Product for Low Energy consumption'. So shouldn't it be called the 'Simplec' then?
Mark Nichol - 16 Oct 2009