Gadgetory

you know the rage these days seems to be automakers developing sub brands of very efficient cars here's BMWs it's going to be called the I've series but it's a whole sub brand of their standard line of vehicles kind of the way Toyota is expanding Prius to be an entire sub brand of their line of cars now what's happening here is a pure electric on this car i'm going to show you another I in just a few moments this is a little mega city car if you will it's about a hundred miles on a charge lots of aluminum and carbon fiber keeping the weight down to under a thousand kilograms that's what about 2,700 pounds not super light not tesla roadster light but we're getting in there as you can see we've got a lot of show car features here those suicide doors will never make it into production neither will that space-age dashboard but when this car comes to market in 2013 we're talking about a very different kind of BMW one that is all about electricity and not necessarily all about the ultimate driving machine message efficiency is becoming a huge headline for these folks now they point out the wall this car is a city car it's not a dinky little car this is a pretty spacious machine even in total concept car trim here but let me show you the iseries that you really want to see I ate it's over here okay this one's called the i8 concept now we're talking even more show karush even less likely to show up in a showroom in this form in 2014 when it does arrive however let's take a look at this now this one's not pure electric it's a plug-in hybrid so it can get a lot of electric range because it's got big batteries as plugins do but it's also got a three cylinder twinpower turbo gas engine now twin power can mean different things in BMW language that can mean a twin stage single turbo or twin turbos don't know at this point but it gives us car big performance aspirations not just efficiency zero to 60 in under five seconds while delivering something around 87 miles per gallon they're also talking a lot about the connected services that will be coming in all these iseries vehicles things like park at my house a service where you can let ppl park at your space where you live or drive now which is a car sharing service between be w in a big rental company in Europe that focuses solely on city car share of efficient vehicles like that I three and of course you can see inside the dash of this I ate their envisioning all kinds of connected services for navigation communication streaming infotainment of all kinds and I also see what appears to be a vision of an augmented reality screen laying information on an actual view of the road in front of you but again this is show car stuff in the details the big story here is BMW is launching a sub brand of electric or highly electrified vehicles 2013 for the I 3 2014 for the IH