When young, nimble companies displace established, stalwart ones, it
forces everyone to keep on their toes. Disruption has pushed the
consumer tech world to insane levels of churn, but even the humble
automobile is not immune. Tesla is the poster child for vehicular
disruption, a new brand launching a new luxury automobile that, within a
few months, was outselling popular models from Lexus, Porsche, and even
BMW. Others are coming, with their own alternative cars and
motorcycles, all intent on knocking the now-familiar brands from their
comfortable perches.
Keenly aware of its position in the crosshairs, the Bavarian Motor Works
decided to disrupt itself. Thus was born Project i and the i3, the
first fruit plucked from that young tree. It's BMW's first
full-production, full-electric vehicle, following in the treadmarks
established by the Active e and Mini e prototypes that came before. It is a city
car,
short and narrow yet tall, a boxlike shape that affords a surprising
amount of interior room within diminutive dimensions. Its 18.8kWh
battery park, mounted in the floor for a lower center of gravity, offers
a maximum of 118-mile range, powering a rear-mounted 168 hp engine.
It's surprisingly quick, surprisingly fun to drive, and has more and
better high-tech appointments than any other EV on the road -- even
Tesla's Model S.
However, priced at $45,300 when it hits US dealers in early 2014, it's
not for everybody. It's made of premium materials throughout, starting
with a chassis that's largely woven of carbon fiber reinforced plastic,
or CFRP. The i3 is the first production car made of the stuff, and while
it isn't quite as strong or as light as proper carbon fiber (which
requires a huge amount of manual labor to mold and bake), CFRP is still
far stronger and lighter than steel, resulting in a fully electric car
that weighs just 2,600 pounds -- less than most gasoline-powered cars
sold in the US today.
The interior, meanwhile, is riddled with techy bits, including
smartphone connectivity and an advanced nav system that can help you
find a charger when you're running out of juice. It also offers the
sorts of premium driving aids that you'd expect on a premium car, like
adaptive cruise control and even a traffic jam assist that enables the
car to drive itself at low speeds. It's a machine that feels remarkably
free of compromises, a striking contrast to many other contemporary EVs,
which make do with limited features and functionality to keep costs
down.
A 40-year effort
The i3 is just the first step of BMW i. The company had fiddled with EVs
in the past, most notably with the 1602 Electric concept that made an
appearance at the opening ceremonies of the 1972 Munich Olympics. That
car was a modified version of the company's 1602 coupe, loaded up with
simple lead acid batteries to deliver an underwhelming maximum range of
19 miles. It was hardly a vision for the future, as BMW never had any
intention of putting it into production.
BMW Project Manager Manuel Sattig
Fast-forward 35 years, to 2007, and BMW is ready to get serious. Manuel Sattig is project manager of Project i.
"The idea behind it was to make the company fit for the future, to see
how mobility will change for the future," he said. "For that, a small
project called Project i was created. The first name we had for the i3
was the Mega City Vehicle. Most of the individual mobility is going to
happen in urbanized areas."
The Mega City Vehicle, or MCV, debuted at the 2012 London Olympics, 40
years after the 1602, and though it would evolve somewhat over the next
12 months, its concept would remain the same. Importantly, this was not
just to be a funky little electric car. The i3 was to be the harbinger
of a new brand full of fresh ideas that would ultimately percolate
through the entire company. "i is still a BMW," Sattig told me, "but
it's looking at other forms of mobility and of course sustainability at
the core. Both eventually support the entire BMW brand."
That starts with small things for now, like the i3's remarkably thin
seats. To save space and weight in the car, the goal was to create
something dramatically thinner and lighter than the plush and comfy but
bulky and heavy leather-wrapped thrones found in most BMWs. Daniel
Starke, head of interior design at BMW i, walked me through the
thinking. "We knew we wanted thin seats, because when you open the door
you know you didn't want a big chunk of leather....That is better when
you sit in the car, more room for your knees. It is better when you get
in and out of the car, and they look really cool."
That they do, but they're still very comfortable and, perhaps more
importantly, very light. Designers for BMW's other models, themselves on
the quest of reducing weight to increase fuel economy, now want these
seats in their cars. Starke calls this the "pull effect," with the
products in the Project i running ahead and dragging the rest of the
company's offerings along.
An interior like a loft apartment
The thin seats help to create an open, roomy feel inside the BMW i3,
which is just a foot longer than a Mini. This airy feel is unlike other
BMW models on the road, known for their generally sombre, driver-focused
cockpits.
Christian Knoll, an interior designer at BMW i, likens the i3's
interior to a loft apartment. "The whole car is a change in corporate
culture. Moving away from this driver-oriented cockpit to a living room,
which is open to all passengers, where the driver is not in a monopoly
information position. It is quite radical."
"We wanted to keep the stress out," Starke said. "When you're moving
through a mega city it's quite stressful, and we wanted to give that
person, a driver, the feeling that he is at home. We wanted to create a
roomy and quiet atmosphere."
The architecture of the i3, with a flat floor and an electric motor
tucked between the rear wheels, makes that possible. "We had this empty
room, because all the technical bits are out of the way," he said. "That
gave us a big opportunity to take out the double-DIN that's normally in
the center stack, we chucked that under the rear seat."
This means there's no bulky center console, just a lot of room for legs and cubbies for gadgets.
Even though that center stack was mostly deleted, its functionality was
not. Despite the futuristic look and feel of the car, all of the
controls for interacting with the stereo system, navigation, and things
like headlights and turn signals, are very traditional. Familiar, even.
Knoll, the interior designer, calls this "clever simplicity."
"We know from market research that some people are worried if they have
to learn a lot of new things when they drive an electric car. Our aim
was to make it as easy and comfortable as possible and also to provide
maximum transparency about what the car can do and also what the user
can do in order to go beyond these limits."
So, the i3 features a virtually unmodified version of BMW's (now aptly
titled) iDrive control system for navigating through system menus. Any
BMW owner will feel right at home. Knoll says that you already have to
teach EV buyers many new things, like how to charge the car and manage
range.
"This already costs attention. If you change too much about what
people already know about the vehicle it can be most advanced but not
acceptable."
The familiar, then, is as important as the unfamiliar.
Still, the i3 designers opted to make one radical change in the controls
of the car: shifting gears. In a traditional, manual car, the shifter
is a center-mounted stick that is physically connected to the gearbox.
Move the stick and, assuming you depressed the clutch and gave the
synchros time to do their thing, the transmission engages the next gear.
Automatic transmissions handle the complexities of shifting themselves,
but that concept of tilting a stick into D or R continued.
Multiple gears are needed to enable a car to move effectively at low or
high speeds, because an internal combustion engine is only truly
effective within a narrow range of speeds. Electric motors, with far
fewer moving parts, can spin far faster and, crucially, deliver full
power at any RPM. Finally, since they can spin just as well in either
direction, they don't require a discrete reverse gear. In other words,
the idea of shifting is properly obsolete in most EVs.
So, the team decided to exorcise the stick shifter, getting extra
motivation by putting a flat, continuous bench seat up front in the
early concepts. The idea was that you could slide from the driver's side
to the passenger's side, or put a third person in the middle. That
concept would ultimately be deleted, as individual adjustments for
driver and passenger became difficult, but still the team worked hard on
numerous ways to replace the ubiquitous shifter.
"We thought about buttons, but we found that to be really unsexy. It's
not an essential feeling....It was too abstract; that's not emotional,"
Knoll said.
Of the "very many" concepts Knoll said the team evaluated, he settled on
a sort of twist-grip that's mounted to the right of the steering wheel.
You simply angle it in the direction you want to go. "The semantics
tell you cleanly what you need to do: twist forward to drive, twist
backward to reverse."
Gas and brake pedals on the floor work like normal, two holdouts from
the early days of driving that Knoll and team decided to leave alone --
for now.
New drivers to the i3 will probably be a bit befuddled by this shifting
arrangement at first, as indeed I was, but after the first few drive
selections it becomes second nature. That said, with the whopping number
of other buttons used to control the car's key functionality, another
few marked P, R, and D would likely not have had much of an impact on
the car's sensuality.
Driving impressions
Tilt the shifter into D and, with a gentle press of the gas pedal, the
i3 smoothly accelerates down the road. Like other EVs, the power and
throttle response are immediately apparent, but it's far easier to be
smooth here than in most. The i3 feels like it's being pulled along by
an invisible magnet.
It rolls on impossibly skinny tires that would look perfectly at home on
a horse-drawn carriage, 19 inches in diameter but just 6 inches in
width. That's 4 inches taller than those found on a Toyota Prius, yet
1.5 inches narrower.
"The tires are specially made for i3," said Michael Lenz, who handles
driving dynamics for BMW i. "They have small rolling resistance and,
with the rim design, better aerodynamics."
They also help the car to achieve a tight turning radius of 32.3 feet
-- a huge help on the narrow and congested streets of Amsterdam, where I
tested the car.
Their skinny width necessarily limits grip but not so much that the i3
isn't fun to drive. In fact, it handles remarkably well. The battery
packs are mounted low, that 168 hp motor provides its drive to the rear
wheels, and I had a blast zipping around in the thing. Unfortunately,
though, the nondefeatable traction control will serve as something of an
intolerant governor, shutting down power at the slightest hint of
wheelspin. I asked Lenz why they didn't add a Sport mode that would
allow you to have a little more fun.
"We don't have this," he said. "It should not be a sports mobile. It
should be an economic city mobile, but I think in the Comfort mode it is
really sporty."
More models to come
If you're looking for something properly sporty, you'll need to wait for
the next car from the group. "i8 is something completely different,"
said Lenz.
It debuted in 2009 at the Frankfurt auto show as
Vehicle Efficient Dynamics concept; it's actually a plug-in hybrid,
relying on a three-cylinder turbodiesel engine in the rear paired with
an electric motor in the front. The pair of powerplants enable the car
to be all-wheel drive and quite fast (accelerating to 60 mph in less
than 7 seconds) while delivering nearly 100 mpg.
BMW i Project Manager Sattig said the Vehicle Efficient Dynamics concept
was meant to envision a "true sportscar of the future....Reactions we
so drastic that it was clear we had to produce the car." And so they
did, with an anticipated launch in 2014. It's a very different machine
than the i3, says Daniel Starke: "As it is a sports car, it is much more
focused on the driver. You sit much lower in the car with the batteries
next to you. It's a different layout, but also a purpose-built layout
with carbon fiber."
On Thursday, Verizon Wireless announced the introduction of a new $5-a-day data plan for customers with
tablets
and other Internet connected devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy
camera. The new plan will let users connect to Verizon's 4G LTE data
network for 24 hours with access to up to 300 megabytes worth of data. 
