Last August (on my since abandoned blog – who doesn’t have an abandoned blog?), I wrote the following:
“Look for the Isetta name to pop up more often in the future. BMW is building a ’sub-brand’ to market extremely efficient cars, some which may be all electric, and – horror of horrors – front wheel drive (FWD). Protecting the premium performance cachet of the BMW name will necessitate using a different name to accompany the BMW roundel on the new cars.
It’s unknown if or when the hyper-efficient BMWs will come to the US.
Here’s an ad being shown in Germany now:
Ostensibly the commercial was for the BMW museum, but heck why highlight the Isetta? Well maybe this is why: http://new-isetta.info
This link popped up on Jalopnik today and also on a few other forums. A little digging by a number of people, including yours truly and our fearless editor-in-chief, Horatiu, it turns out to have been registered in May 2008 to one Olivier Molody. Kind of a unique name. What are the odds that a totally unrelated Olivier Molody works for BMW’s DesignWork USA. Coincidence? Not if you’re a conspiracy theorist.
The source code of the site seems to have all the requisite ‘green’ meta tags. So is theis the sign of things to come, the awaited Mega City vehicles, the FWD BMW? Heck if I know.
But the moral of this story may be, BMW knows how to generate buzz, and they’re playing us like Joshua Bell plays a Strad.
BMWBLOG final verdict: Most likely fake, especially since the logo is a cheap combination between BMW and MINI’s logos.
Author: Hugo Becker
Source: http://www.bmwblog.com/2010/07/16/the-new-isetta/