Automotive designer Chacko Abraham is an old acquaintance of ours who impressed us with a reinterpretation of Porsche’s 907 and 908 race cars for the electric era. Now, he’s back with another virtual electromod, and this time he chose to focus on one of BMW’s most iconic cars, the E9 coupe built from 1968 to 1975 as part of the automaker’s New Class range. “The goal was to explore the possibility of a grand touring BMW that really took into consideration the human factors of classic coupes,” Chacko Abraham told CarScoops.
The main inspiration for this neo-retro
BMW EV9 concept appears to be the E9 3.0 CS but the designer borrowed cues from
other models as well. You can see many of the elegant coupe’s defining features
reinterpreted in a contemporary way.
At the front, those include the
inward-slanting nose with a pair of tiny kidney grilles flanked by round double
LED headlights on each side, the 3.0 CSL-inspired front bumper, as well as the
subtle turn signals filling the line between the bonnet and front fascia.
Seen from the side, BMW signature
Hofmeister kink is preserved (unlike on the new 4 Series coupe), as is the
pillar-less design of the doors. The wheels are not inspired by the E9 coupe
but the M1 mid-engined supercar. As for the rear end, it’s got a Kamm tail with
sleek horizontal LED taillights at the top and a diffuser-like element at the
bottom.
The interior is minimalist, with the
designer focusing the attention on the four-spoke steering wheel and two round
gauges above it. There’s no big screen inside and Chacko Abraham, who works as
an interior designer for Ford and Lincoln, explained to us why he took this
approach.
