A shouty, fun new BMW is joining the hot hatch fray
The 128 Ti is a revival of a designation dating back to 1963 and a reminder of how much joy a well-thought-through hatchback performance car can bring.
BMW’s 128 Ti adds further variety to what is a golden age of hot hatches.
If you had to nominate the archetypal Millennial car, it would be the hot hatch. The origin of the species can be traced at least as far back as mid-1976, when VW produced a higher-performance “GTi” version of its front-wheel-drive Golf hatchback.
The GTi arrived at a time affordable roadsters were disappearing (they didn’t really come back until the MX-5 and Ford Capri of the late 1980s) and people were looking for something smaller, cheaper and more frugal than the traditional big-engined performance car.
