How To Get An Electric Supercar For 1/4 Of The Price? Ask Rich

He has bought and fixed an i8 and now owns a $147,500 car for $35,000.

Gustavo Henrique Ruffo

By: Gustavo Henrique Ruffo

Dec 3, 2019 at 8:14am ET

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Imagine your dream car. After that, imagine getting it for a little less than ¼ of the price. More precisely, 23.7 percent of it. Wouldn’t it be a dream deal as well? If you have the skills and the time, you can follow the Rich Rebuilds gospel, buy a wrecked one, and put it to work. That is what Rich Benoit has done with the BMW i8.

Gallery: Rich Rebuilds Gets A BMW i8 For A Quarter Of The Price

Benoit told us in November how he got obsessed with the supercar back in November. In 2017, he went to an electric vehicle show, and, among all Tesla Model S in different colors there, he saw an i8. And he decided he would buy one, which he did with the help of IAA. Not the Frankfurt Motor Show but rather Insurance Auto Auctions.

With the car delivered, he could assess the damages and start to see what he had to repair. The wrecked i8 cost him $28,000. The bonnet needed to be replaced, and the right headlight, left-rear wheel, and left taillight were not there anymore.

As you already know, Benoit does most of the work himself. All he had to do was getting a repair manual for the car – he teaches how to do that in the video – and buying the necessary parts.

One inventive solution he had to keep costs down was to buy an orange bonnet and, instead of painting it, he just had it wrapped. It did the trick.

What do you think?

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With the car ready, the parts cost him $7,000 more, bringing the total price of the car to a mere $35,000. If you think a brand-new one costs $147,500, you reach the 23.7 percent of the price we mentioned earlier in this text.

That is not the sort of thing you can just decide to do. You have to be savvy in choosing the car, searching for the parts, and skilled enough to do all that by yourself. Anyway, if you have got what it takes, you can have a stylish Prius – as Benoit provocatively classifies his i8 – for a fraction of the price.