BMW Explains Why Its New Electric Car Looks So Strange

The 2014 World Car Awards were presented at the New York Auto Show this morning, and BMW's all-electric i3 came away as the star, winning World Green Car and World Car Design of the Year.

The latter is somewhat surprising (or maybe not), given the i3's totally unconventional looks: It's nothing like the cars that made BMW one of the world's premiere automakers.

But even before the award was announced, BMW defended the bold look.

"The design is, can be polarizing to people," head of EV Operations and Strategy for BMW North America Jacob Harb said in an interview at the auto show. But there are two reasons it looks the way it does: It's made for electric driving in a city, and it's meant to bring new customers into the brand.

"The concept was designed in the beginning to be a mega-city vehicle," Ludwig Willisch, President and CEO of BMW North America, told Business Insider. It seats four people but is small enough to zip through tight traffic and roads, which explains its proportions.

BMW designers could surely have made a car that fit that mandate without looking so unusual, or converted an existing model to run on electricity, but that wasn't the mission. The i3 is made to appeal to a new set of customers, Willisch said.

"What we know from research is that people that drive a car like that want to make a statement, they want to show that they choose a different way of mobility. It’s not the ordinary steel car with an exhaust pipe.”