Bmw E1 1991 First electric car that bmw produced!

The E1 was first shown off at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 1991.



It was extremely lightweight for the time. It had an aluminum shell and used plastic body pieces to keep the weight down.



It used a sodium-nickel chloride battery, not the lithium-ion type that's used in Teslas today.
It took only a few hours to fully charge an E1 and it was capable of driving over 150 miles. That's right on par with a lot of the electric cars that are on sale today.




The E1 caught a bad rep after a prototype caught fire while charging. Both the car and part of a building it was near were severely damaged.



The interior looked pretty standard, if you can get past all the green.




Source : http://www.techinsider.io/

im a bit confused so if bmw made a battery powered car in 1991 with 150 mile range why 25 years later do they have a car that will only do 75 miles on a charge thats not progress...

That wasn't the first electric car that BMW produced. The BMW 1602e in 1972 was:

http://blog.caranddriver.com/orange-juiced-bmws-first-ev-paved-the-way-for-the-i8-amid-an-olympic-tragedy/

depechemode said:

The E1 was first shown off at the Frankfurt Auto Show in 1991.

Source : http://www.techinsider.io/

Click to expand...

Thank you, that is very interesting indeed. I really like that car!

Not the first EV for BMW and it did not make it to production, it is my understanding that it almost made it until the one caught fire. I do see some of its styling in the i3 and it is a little interesting that their names are nearly mirror images of each other.

E1 - I3 (i3)