The Future of Cars: 3OH!3 Test Drive the Mitsubishi i-MiEV Electric

The Band: 3OH!3
The Car: Mitsubishi i-Miev Electric
The Location: Los Angeles, CA

It's not easy to find a vehicle with a name as punctuationally nonsensical as 3OH!3, the Boulder, Colorado duo behind the smash frat-rock anthem "Don't Trust Me." But the Mitsubishi i-Miev is up to the task. The band is named for their hometown area code (303); the car's name is an acronym for "Mitsubishi innovative electric vehicle," which fails to explain the exta "I" at the front. Oh, well. It's Japanese.

Nathaniel Motte and Sean Foreman have just flown in to L.A. after a few days off to relax and sleep off their hangovers from their first-ever Video Music Awards "We're trying to piece together what happened," Motte says. The two meet their car outside the Standard Hotel, on L.A.'s Sunset Strip, and it's a toss up which is bigger, the i-Miev — a fully electric microcar that looks like it drove straight out of a cartoon — or Motte, who is six-foot-seven. Standing together, they looked like the number 10.

Foreman, a regular sized person, takes the wheel first — once he locates it. This being a prototype from Japan (an American version won't arrive until 2011 or so), the car's steering wheel is on the right side, so everything, including the wipers and signals, is reversed. It's a weird experience the first time you ride in an electric car, which has no engine noise (think golf cart), so Foreman double-checked to be sure the i-Miev was on and rolled out into traffic.

NEXT: 3OH!3 Face off with a Smart car
while test-driving the i-Miev