Better eight than never

Not even 007 could make the Z8 hang together. His was sliced in half along its length by a phalanx of tree-cutting circular saws that swung viciously beneath a helicopter, and Q did not like it one bit. But the gruesome demise met by Bond’s car in The World Is Not Enough was nothing compared to the evisceration BMW’s V8 roadster received at the hands of the motoring media a year later.

How bad? Evo magazine wrote ‘it doesn’t feel much like a real sports car’, Clarkson called it ‘awful’ before comparing it to a skip lorry and Autocar concluded it ‘fails to involve its driver as any car must before it can be labelled a great driving machine’. A three out of five star road test verdict from that august periodical was about as damning as it got for the Z8. Under the flinty road testers’ gaze, the Z8 fell to pieces all over again.