AUSTIN, Texas — I have news for you: Electric cars can do donuts. In a recent test drive inside BMW's new i3 electric car, we tested this theory in a small Austin parking lot. To be fair, we never truly "spun" around, but that's only because I was nervous about breaking a law and the driver cautiously held back.
The electric car, a small four-door, five-seater that gets 80 miles to a charge, is finally coming to the United States early this year — and it already has at least one nifty digital integration that could help make this sporty car more attractive to families. It's designed to help you keep track of, find and communicate with family members wherever they are. Life360, the family locator app that set up our test drive, now has dashboard-level integration with the new BMW i3, along with iPhone and Android handsets.
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A look inside BMW's first all-electric car.
Image: Mashable / Lance Ulanoff
Inside the relatively spacious interior of the car is a rather unusual dashboard covered in leather, plastic and eucalyptus wood. It features a push-button start and a small automatic transmission control that juts out of the steering wheel; the dash itself is a smallish screen above the steering wheel. Adjacent is the main control screen where drivers can access the car's iDrive system (controlled by a button/nob between the seats), which is where you'll also find the Life360 interface.
Life360, which is currently used by 30 million families, according to company executives (and roughly 70 million total users), only works if all family members have it installed. It's really an opt-in program, so don't any ideas about surreptitiously installing it on your teenager's phone. To see it on the BMW i3 screen, we plugged in an iPhone already running the app.

Image: Mashable / Lance Ulanoff
The free app lets you create multiple family circles. On our screen, we could see the faces of the "family" members in our group, as well as their locations. After selecting a person, the app switched to the BMW i3's in-car navigation system and led us to his location.
Life360 can also be more passive. If your teenager is driving the BMW i3 (he should be so lucky) as well as Life 360, you can choose to get notifications when he arrives at his destination or leaves a predefined geofenced area. You can also create calendar-based geofencing that only exists on a schedule: Perhaps your family has to make it to a party but everyone is coming from different locations. You can opt for a notification every time a family member makes it to the destination.
Features like messaging, check-ins, panic buttons and live advisors also extend to the car interface. The advisor, however, is a premium feature. So while Life360 and most of its features are free, the OnStar-like in-car assistant system, which gives you live help wherever you are, costs families $5 per month.
Right now, only a fraction of Life360's members use the feature. When we asked about long-term monetization, our Life360 driver explained that the service is busy collecting a rather large group of people concerned about family and safety — a group that could be interested in other products and services, all of which may offer the app a path to monetization.
Longterm, the company expects to integrate with more "Internet of things" apps and hardware, but for now, the integration with the BMW i3 is pretty smooth and interesting. Now we just have to wait for the car, which should retail for around $42,000, to arrive.
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