The time has finally arrived, the BMW body obscuring cladding has come off the next generation 1-Series hatchback (F20). The car has grown in size to parallel the car's growth in popularity and aims to improve upon the original 1-Series. It goes without saying that quality will be improved, but what these pictures confirm is what has so far been speculation regarding styling.
The next generation 1-series will fall in line with the rest of the BMW range. The car has a newly sculpted hood reminiscent of the F10 5-series and F25 X3 with sharp and hyper crisp body sculpting line running from the front fender through the door handles to the rear in an aggressive arc. The front and rear bumpers too follow the current BMW trends of aggressive and angular shapes that were normally reserved for M-Sport variants.
However, do not be fooled by the clever black masking tape around the headlights. This masking pattern is in place to throw you off the mark. Upon close inspection of the pictures, the car actually looks to have a headlight cutout shape that roughly approximates the 5-Series GT, however with some very unique elements, namely the inner high beam lights are offset and elevated from the regular headlamps that should give the car an extremely menacing front end.
With this amount of camouflage removed from the car at once, expect more details about this car to appear in the next coming months in fairly rapid form. It seems for now that BMW will follow the formula used for the original 1-Series and the 3-Series, which is to release the base variant (hatchback) first, and then follow up with the Coupe and Convertible a year later.
The car itself is built on BMWs new modular platform that allows BMW to expand the 1-Series range with more variants then ever while reducing costs, allowing BMW to give us more. Expect heavy use of turbo technology with the typical 4 and 6 cylinder engines. However, the oft-rumored Three cylinder engine may also make its debut with this car.
Read Article