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A recent BMW i3 meet in Southern California. Photo credit:  Steve J. Myung Do you drive a BMW i3, i8 or X5 40e?  Are you a Formula E fan? Do you live in Southern California or can make it to Long Beach at 9:30am on Saturday, April 2nd, and would like to help break the Guinness World Record for the Largest Parade of BMW cars? After the idea was cooked up by a few BMW i3 owners in Southern California, BMW NA got involved to help organize and promote the effort.  It still very much a grass-roots type of effort with social media the primary force of spreading the word. Participants in the event, will get two grandstand tickets to that day's Long Beach Formula E, compliments of BMW NA. Organizers need to get 179 or more BMWs to participate to break the record set in 2008, when 178 BMW Isetta owners organized in  Rödental, Germany and set the current record.  BMW i will also have on display the i3, i8, X5 40e and new 330e at the Formula E Village for participants to v...

Back on October 16th 2011, I celebrated the first National Plug in Day at the only event being held within driving range of my MINI-E. That was held in New York City and was one of 29 events held nationally. Last year National Plug in Day was expanded to a weekend (even though we still called it "plug in day") because there was such interest we wanted to have more opportunities to hold events. There ended up being a little over 100 different events and it was indeed so successful, that for this year and moving forward it will be called National Drive Electric Week, and we'll dedicate an entire week to host events. My MINI-E on display at the very first National Plug in Day back in 2011 This year there were an amazing 152 events taking place in 5 countries, 39 US states and 6 Canadian Provinces. There were 150 different cities in which owners of over 3,000 electric vehicles registered to display their cars and share their electric driving experience with the public. The Cu...

Horatiu Boeriu of BMWBLOG recently did a piece titled "BMW vs. Tesla - Which Company Is A Bigger Innovator?" in which he mentions that while both companies are competing in the premium automobile segment and are committed to electric mobility, they are taking different paths to achieve success. I'm not going to try to analyze who has it right or who is a bigger innovator, but it's clear that both companies have chosen to focus on different aspects of their respective vehicles. With Tesla, it's all about the batteries. Unlike every other automobile manufacturer, BMW included, Tesla's approach isn't for their electric cars to complement their lineup of gasoline and diesel offerings since they don't have any. Instead, it is to render gasoline vehicles from their competitors obsolete. In order to do so, their cars have to be at least as good or better than most features of competing gas cars; and that includes range, performance and utility. BMW on the ot...

A full range of official press photos of this semi-camouflaged Mi3 will be released a couple days before NAIAS in two weeks. This is the only one I was authorized to reveal. A bout six months ago, Eric Loveday of InsideEVs.com wrote this article that predicted the BMW M performance division won't be making an M version of the upcoming BMW i3 or i8. I've known for a while now that that was not true, but the information I got from BMW was under embargo until now so I couldn't comment on it previously. I finally got a chance to look at a pre-production ///M i3 last week. The car I saw didn't have all the body work or the special wheels that the ///M i3 pictured above has since this one is being used for internal testing here at BMW's North American headquarters, but it did have all the performance upgrades and ///M badging. I was lucky to be one of only a few people to get a sneak peak of the M i3 before its unveiling at NYIAS in two weeks. P erhaps this was the inten...

BMW has released a series of commercials that will be used for commercials during the Sochi Winter Olympics which just opened yesterday. There are spots for many of the new BMW products but the BMW i3 spots will be the first commercials ever aired in the US for the car so I've posted them here. The commercials are titled "Shhh", "Reasons", "Cop" and "Zero Gallons". I really like Shhh & Cop. I think Reasons is OK and am not a big fan of  Zero Gallons. Shhh (seen above) is great. A father comes home and when his son wonders why he didn't hear him pull up the dad says "Electric car...sneaky" and goes off to bed. This gives the kid the great idea of sneaking out quietly with the car for a rendezvous with his girlfriend; something that many teenage kids do. I remember pushing my dads 1976 Oldsmobile Starfire out of the driveway late at night so he wouldn't hear me "borrowing" it. I would then shut it off before I re...

It's -2 degrees F here in Canada and I'm talking BMW i3 at Budd's BMW in Oakville! I've written a few posts on my blogs about how poorly many dealerships have done when it comes to selling their electric car offerings. I blasted Nissan and GM pretty good a while back and had hoped that BMW would learn from the mistakes the other OEM's made when they rolled their EV's into their dealers' showrooms. However I'm starting to wonder if that will be the case. Electric cars are different in so many ways. If the sales team isn't prepared for the onslaught of questions that they are going to get hit with as soon as the i3 becomes available to order, then it will not only hurt sales of the i3 but it will certainly tarnish the BMW brand image. BMW dealers will have an even tougher time than the other brands had in my opinion because the i3 isn't just an electric car, it really is a revolutionary vehicle. Besides the typical EV questions about the car's...