Have you always wanted a BMW i3, but for religious or moral reasons you're against speed and quality? If so, today's a fantastic day for you, my friends, since you can move to China and buy yourself a Jinma JMW2200. Think of the money you'll save! And, if everyone who sees it is really, really drunk, everyone will think you have a BMW!
The Jinma JMW2200 is a low-speed electric vehicle that was just shown at the Shangdong EV Expo. Those of you clever with letter-identification may have noticed a slight similarity between the name "JMW" and "BMW." See what they did there? Even better, this similarity carries into Chinese as well, as our friends at CarNewsChina tell us:
Even the brand names are similar. Jinma (金马) means 'Golden Horse' and the Chinese name of BMW is Baoma (宝马), meaning 'Treasure Horse'.
BMW means 'Treasure Horse' in Chinese? That's amazing. They should play that up more stateside, if you ask me. I've always wanted a round-taillight Treasure Horse 2002. See? That sounds pretty good.
Jinma did a pretty thorough job of dressing up their little narrow four-door electro-crapbox in a BMW i3 costume. They have the black hood, an even blingier version of the kidney grilles (which, interestingly, are more like actual grilles than what BMW uses on the i3), they got the bumper design copied along with the contrasting black detailing, and even made remarkably i3-like LED taillights in the i3-style blacked-out tailgate.
I know there's a lot of people — probably most people — that think this is hideous, and, sure, technically, it is, but there's a big old-school punk part of me that loves the crap out of this absurd thing. I love how gleefully it rips off the i3 look with nary a donor fuck to be found. I love how it's so half-ass and yet so earnest all at the same time. Driving one of these around and then parking it next to a real i3 seems like one of those acts that probably just feels perversely fantastic like that thing I looked up on the internet last night.
I hope China never stops making absurd knockoffs like this.