BMW i3 – A 5-Door Sedan Urban Electric Car

A brilliant bite out of the Apple zeitgeist

iPod, iPad. iPhone. iMac. iCar. I know you’re thinking “that certainly doesn’t look like a BMW and it doesn’t have a bitten-fruit logo either”.

When you notice the unorthodox naming convention, a prefixed lower case ‘i, the association is even less BMW, despite the 3. If they added a zero, it could have been a Hyundai i30. Blame Apple. The iconic communication brand’s i-devices are so wildly popular that any product planner now automatically desires a naming convention with some i-prefixed association.

Pity BMW. As the automotive equivalent of Apple, marketing products of marque desirability by virtue of their singular engineering excellence, can you imagine the titanic weight of expectation conferred on the i3? After all, it’s a BMW and an iCar all in one. Being just good enough would be disastrous: the i3 has to be mercurial to achieve parity with the double brand expectation.

To avoid this, BMW has made sure the i3 is not in any way an electrified 3 Series. As a project and platform all of its own, it was never designed to be anything other than a battery-powered electric car.

A consequence of this clean sheet (or rather clean screen) engineering enterprise is styling unlike any prior BMW. Those signature kidneys are still present front and center, but without grille slats they are a mere decorative ode to heritage. With its entire drivetrain (motors and battery) in the floor, i3′s stylists could trace proportions that owed no responsibility to cooling or accommodating an upright, internal combustion engine. If you think it looks odd, that’s like saying a jet looks weird compared to a prop-driven airplane: they’re both aviation designs, their differences in appearance dictated by propulsion.

Inside, it’s a world of wow factor, in an IKEA-inspired way. There’s an unpolished Eucalyptus wood inlay running horizontally from the digital instrumentation screen across to the opposing A-pillar, quite unlike the conventional Darth Vader cabin architecture BMW is often criticized for.

BMWs, though, are for driving. It’s not incidental that the brand’s most memorable tagline is “sheer driving pleasure”.

The i3 doesn’t disappoint. To this end an interesting Dutch man, Jos van As (who’s email signature titles him rather vaguely as a ‘vehicle integration’ per-son), was responsible for the i3′s driving dynamics.

Why does van As matter? Well, he had a hand in the Gallardo’s chassis, drives a supercharged Ariel Atom and hates caravans – the latter, he jokes, is the reason he left his native Netherlands for Germany. Unsurprisingly then, the i3 is not available with a tow bar. More importantly, van As’s obsession with driving dynamics ensured the i3 is rear-wheel drive with all-wheel independent suspension, as a proper BMW should be.

On the move, the i3 communicates its road surface interactions with unwittingly well-weighted steering, calibrated faithfully to BMW principles. Throttle response is instantaneous, underscored by a muted X-34 Landspeeder-type soundtrack. It’s not insubstantial shove either, with 250Nm of electric motor making the i3 feel swifter than the claimed 7.9-second 0-100kph time. This is indeed an electric car that will not be out of place in the far right lane of the N1.

Issues? Second row passengers have no autonomy concerning their egress, which could get a touch political (or claustrophobic) when i-travelling with kids or in-laws, as the front doors have to be open for the back-hinged rears to function. And there’s a moment of rollback inertia on inclines if your brake-to-throttle pedal coordination is tardy. It’s the opportunity cost of not having maddening throttle creep in traffic, on level surfaces.

BMW’s first electric vehicle has a smaller turning circle than Fiat’s 500, similar cabin space to a 3 Series, better steering than most contemporary cars and costs around R27.50 to charge, good for close on 150km. That converts to 1.3l/100km in petrol speak, which is somewhat brilliant.

All told, the i3 is the iCar Apple wished it could have built. Praise comes no higher.

Verdict

BMW has done what we’d hoped. It’s build the world’s first proper electric car. In SA end 2014.