BMW has unveiled the i3 electric sedan that will be produced and sold exclusively on the Chinese market. In North America, as you may already know, the automaker’s electric sedan offering takes the form of the i4.
What’s interesting about this China-only i3, though, is that it might be giving us a preview of what we’ll get from the revised 3 Series coming soon. That’s just speculation, we caution, because the i3 was developed for China and there may yet be huge differences with whatever BMW decides to do with the 3. Still, odds remain pretty good that the styling language may well migrate to our next 3 Series.
And, another fact worth mentioning. Although we won't see it here, this i3 is the first electric 3 Series ever produced.
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Officially named the i3 eDrive35L, the EV incoporates the automaker's latest-generation electric propulsion system, which means it shares its organs with the iX3, i4 and iX. Maximum power is 281 hp and torque is 295 lb-ft, numbers that allow for a 0-100 km/h acceleration time of 6.2 seconds.
As for range, BMW promises up to 526 km on a single charge of the 66.1 kWh battery. Kind in mind, this is all calculated according to different criteria than ours, so they shouldn’t be taken too literally. The maximum power for DC charging is 95 kW, which means that energy recovery from 10 to 80 percent takes about 35 minutes.
Unfortunately, the image you see is the only one revealed by the company, and we have nothing else to go on regarding the details, including about the interior, at least for now. This Chinese BMW (even the suspension has been tuned for the country's road conditions) will be assembled at the BMW Brillance factory (Brillance is BMW's partner in China), in Shenyang.
Now it remains to be seen what signature our 3 Series will really, actually adopt. For those who like tradition, the grille of this i3 version will certainly be more appealing than the huge face of the current M3.