Our friend Tom Moloughney reports that BMW is planning to launch a limited edition “Electronaut Edition” i3. Here is the report from Tom’s ActiveEMobility blog.
“So yesterday we had the East Coast Electronaut meet at BMW’s North American headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, NJ. After taking turns driving i3’s and getting a tour of the battery tech department and even getting to see a real i3 battery back opened up, we had a question and answer session with Jacob Harb, manager of electric vehicle sales and service for BMW NA. It didn’t take long for the topic of the special Electronaut Edition to come up.
We still didn’t get much details, but were told it’s not just going to be stickers and a chrome badge, that the car will indeed have special equipment that isn’t available on any other i3. Then Jacob asked us what we would think about it being available is a special color combination that isn’t available to regular buyers and he threw out white with BMW i Blue accents. That surprised me a bit because that is one of the regular i3 color combos. I later asked a program manager about that and was told the white i3 will not be available in the US like it is in Europe, for at least the first year! So white would actually be an exclusive color here. Still, I’m not going for that. I don’t really like the i3 in White and I’ll have to pass on the Electronaut Edition if it only comes in white which is what Jacob was implying.
However they weren’t saying that this is etched in stone. BMW was just trying to take our temperature on the subject of color. Personally I don’t think they can mandate any one particular color for the Electronaut Edition. No matter what color they choose they will get a minority approval. BMW will have to let us pick the color or at the very least offer three exterior color choices for this special edition. My favorite i3 color is Laurel Gray with the BMW i Blue trim. I like how it lessens the two-tone color scheme that stands out on all the other i3’s. plus, if they really want to offer us a special color, they should use the Protonic Blue offered on the i8 or grab a unique color from the ///M division. The white with a black hood and roof looks too much like a Panda bear for me and in fact we joke about that in the i3 Facebook group all the time.
I definitely appreciate that BMW is making the effort to make us feel special, and as a group we all think that’s a great gesture. However I just hope they get it right. Obviously nothing short of giving us free cars is going to please everybody – and even then some will probably say they should have given us i8’s! So I’ll offer three different ideas that they could do that would be pretty cool.”
Stay tuned on this!
