Goal For The Green

It takes a special kind of person to live in the Southwest, and BMW is coming up with a line up eco-friendly vehicles that have their own knack for suiting the Southwest lifestyle. Fuel efficiency comes with the territory on all its new vehicles, a must in order for BMW sales to compete with the other eco-focused competition. BMW sales may easily soar above the rest due to the features and versatility that can make Southwest living as awesome as its supposed to be. It’s high time to trade in that used BMW for something sporty, sexy, and seriously efficient.

The Sexy Single

Style and BMW have always gone hand-in-hand, and when the BMW i8 Spyder version hits the market it will include an Earth-friendly option. This dashing and daring specimen has the style of its namesake, with doors that open upwards to mimic a spider’s legs. Nice! Doubly nice is the expected zero to 60 mph in a mere 4.8 seconds noted by PlugInCars.com. That’s plenty of oomph to merge seamlessly onto the desert highways and avoid getting stuck behind semis on Interstate 10.

The Cruising Couple

Cruising the Southwest can be even more fun with your significant other or with pals en route to a double date. The 2013 BMW i3 will easily let you do both. HybridCars.com says the battery-powered electric vehicle will be large enough to fit four passengers, but still stylishly small enough to be considered a subcompact car. Small children and big dogs can easily hitch a ride. A carbon-fiber passenger cell keeps the overall poundage lightweight, as does a 22-kWh lithium-ion battery pack. The i3 features a notable acceleration time of zero to 60 in under 8 seconds, 170 horsepower, and nearly 93 miles of cruising on the battery pack alone.

The Happy Camper

If desert camping is your thing, than the BMW Active Tourer is your vehicle. This plug-in hybrid has four doors for easy gear access as well as a specified cargo area for packing that gear in the first place. All that and it still retains a fairly small footprint at 171 inches long, 72 inches wide and 61 inches tall. “It’s an exercise in maximizing space within the footprint,” the Washington Post notes, and that exercise is successfully executed.

Another major perk of the Active Tourer include its sunroof, MotorTrend.com says, which lets you adjust the amount of light you want with the flick of a button. If your camping expeditions typically involve unexplored terrain, you can also benefit from the eDrive system. This system offers options for keeping fuel-efficiency at a max while traversing your route.

The Feisty Family

The Active Tourer scores big points in the family category, again for its roomy interior and fairly small exterior. MotorTrend.com notes more family-friendly features. A multicolored head-up display keeps your driving info readily visible, an impressive 10.3-inch screen instead of the usual instrument cluster and an infotainment screen lets you easily select how to entertain the kids. Kids in the backseat get even further entertainment thanks to the “Seismic Surf” game that is part of the eDrive system. The game, run on an iPad app, incorporates actual driving conditions into the game.

The Trendy Anyone

Anyone who keeps up with the latest trends will find themselves completely on the mark with an eco-friendly vehicle in the near future. HybridCars.com points out 43 new hybrid, plug-in, diesel or electric vehicles are expected to be available once the 2015 models stream into the showrooms. All these options are also expected to boost eco-friendly vehicles from their three percent market share up to five percent.

This post is authored by: David Gray, who combines his love for cars with his background in money and banking. He writes loans by day and blogs by night in the Los Angeles area.