BMW isn't entirely new to electric vehicles, or EVs; the company has been testing an electric Mini Cooper for awhile now, and we actually wrote about the i3 two years back, when it seemed like just a concept. But now the i3 is officially seeing a release, and it's the first BMW that was designed from the ground up to be an electric car. The benefits are pretty obvious: it's the lightest EV out there, with one of the quickest charging times and excellent performance. And it looks pretty weird, just like an electric vehicle should.

One of the things we really like about the i3 is that it looks different. Lots of EVs attempt to blend in, to be normal-looking cars that just happen to have a totally different engine system, but that's going to lead to inefficiencies, because EVs have different needs, different strengths and weaknesses, than traditional gas, diesel, or hybrid cars.