Join us this week as we venture into the plush leather seats of the ultimate retro techno-toy: BMW’s 8-Series. In order to pay proper tribute to the veritable king of rapid luxury, we’ve tracked down Taylor Patterson’s pristine example of the line-topping, limited-production 850CSi.
Well the design of the eight to me is unlike any of the other cars that the company has built if you look at the body style that single a pillar rising to no be pillar down to that big fat c pillar and the kink makes you know it’s a bmw the instrumentation inside reminds you that it’s just like other bmws except that this one sets itself apart because it is
So futuristic looking the first time i saw the the 31 was from a brochure than my dad brought home he was nineteen ninety and he dropped by the dealer right and he brought this thing home and described for me that bmw had taken two in line sixes smooshed them together and you know doubled the coil count doubled the spark plugs doubled the everything in this
Engine and wrapped it in this technological marvel of internetworking the car had its own network i remember him saying that because we were both in the network at the time he was really the first time i saw this car come to life it was through his admiration for how this car had been built that i fell in love with it the bmw 850 csi is a 5.6 almost 5.7 liter
V12 this is the granddaddy boompa engine of the line this car has a six-speed transmission which was unheard of in the 90s the horsepower delivered at the factory was 280 horsepower so after they built this block the mclaren wanted an engine for their f1 and they came to be in w for it and so this engine block found its way into the mclaren f1 eventually as the
Basis for that high performance race car it’s a heavy car it’s a gt you know grand grand touring car it weighs about 4,200 pounds and by today’s standards that’s not too heavy but in the 90s that was a heavy car this car suspension is a little tighter steering ratio is a little tighter so driving the csi is like driving a high-performance highest-performance
Gt i remember driving this car down the hill behind the mini in a rally and they were quite surprised that i could stay on their tail the whole way down this car is my car there’s no other car for me i feel like james bond driving this car this car is the bond car or the bruce wayne car my daddy was always kind of this lone wolf his mother died when he was
Young when i think it was 17 16 years old his dad kind of couldn’t handle it so he went to live with his grandmother i imagine you know he grew up kind of pretty lonely got stuck to himself extremely smart knew a lot about everything so he grows up kind of lonely there was no like sense of family from him his family was carved his family was his friends and
Is in his community that worked on carve as he got older life’s expenses and paying for kids i mean it changes you know what you can afford and so he did less and less with cars just as i was kind of ramping up my interested in cars and ability to buy cars being able to pick him up at the airport with this car and hand him the key and then have him drive us
Home i mean you should have seen the smile on his face he had finally experienced that the execution of that passion that he had always had for this car one of my most memorable experiences was taking my 850 all clean shiny to the hilt in almost perfect condition and you know i got to go to the dealership to pick up the part and i would come out and the
Salespeople and the people looking at other cars surrounded they want to know about it is this a new model or the car even today looks as timeless as it did as beautiful as it did when it was originally built and people today mistake it for a 2017 or 2018 car because you don’t see them on the road that’s kind of one of the neat things about this car it’s
Stuck in time because it wasn’t built for very long and there weren’t that many built so when you see them on the road it’s like seeing sasquatch it is so rare when i see another eight series driving along the road i am so excited and almost always the other owner waves at me as i waved him i mean it’s like we don’t even know each other but we do know each
Other because we both own the dream car that bmw made back in the 90s goes back to my dad i mean he was a dreamer about technology i remember him telling me one time said i really wish i could live another hundred years because i want to see what happens technologically how do we advance you know as as a species where do we go in space and stuff like that
And for me this car it being sort of stuck in time is is really cool but i’ve always yearned to see what bmw would do with a revision a 2020 a 2025 version of this car what kind of what kind of technology they would put in it i mean cars have become so advanced today if my dad were alive today and he could see you know cars that are self-driving and running
On batteries he be systems with this car it’s almost perfect i think the last thing i need to do with it is just maybe respray the front or spray the hood and get it back to its actual pristine dealer perfection but the problem i have with that is it’s just going to get road rash again and otherwise i wouldn’t be able to drive it i’d be stuck in the garage
So i don’t want to become a garage queen i want to i want to keep it drivable and that’s what’s so so visceral exciting about this car so maybe i won’t do anything maybe i’ll just keep it exactly the way it is and just drive it you
Transcribed from video
The BMW 850CSi Is Still The Ultimate Dream Car By Petrolicious