Here are some newish photos of Anne Hathaway and her husband Adam Shulman in Hawaii over the weekend. I guess they spent NYE in Oahu, maybe? Who knows. Anyway, I love them. They confound me and I love seeing photos of them because I can never figure them out. Did Annie marry her best friend? Is she, like, HOT for Adam? Do they have raw sexual chemistry? Haha. No, they do not. But it’s possible they share wardrobes and that he makes her laugh.

Before Oahu, Anne and Adam were in LA, tooling around town in a BMW i3. Since I’m not a car person, that sounded like “Anne and Adam were in a BMW gobblety whatsit.” The BMW i3 is apparently some kind of fancy electric buggy-type car, very cute and small. I’m including a photo below, but you can see a better pic at TMZ. Anyway, the fact that they were driving around LA in this car was notable because the i3 hasn’t been released in America yet, and won’t be for months. So what happened?

For readers who might not be aware of this fact, car companies maintain small numbers of what are called press cars. These are new model vehicles they loan out to reporters and bloggers who they want to drive the car and then write about it, hopefully favorably. For a few gallons of gasoline, they get some free publicity and the writer gets a new car to drive every week or so. Those fleets tend to be concentrated in larger metro areas: New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles.

So, it’s not all that surprising that when a member of the Hollywood paparazzi tailing actress Anne Hathaway caught her and her husband, Adam Shulman, tooling around LA in a new BMW i3 electric car, the more uninformed members of the media jumped to the conclusion the couple had bought the car, which at the moment is only available in Europe. One even commented that Ms. Hathaway had had it shipped to Los Angeles.

However, a closer examination of the photo in question reveals a number ’27’ on the upper righthand corner of the car’s windshield, clearly suggesting that this is a BMW fleet car, probably one of the dozen that it made available for media drives – including EV World correspondent Noel Adams- during the LA Auto Show this past November.

[Dukes of] Hazarding a guess here, it’s probably safe to assume that BMW is loaning some of those i3s it has in LA to various celebrities, including the Shulmans, prior to the car officially going on sale in United States next Spring.

[From EV World]

So, Annie didn’t have a special European car shipped over with some huge expense for Adam. She and Adam merely got a freebie from BMW. Which is interesting to me because Annie has become increasingly surly with the paparazzi (she left dog poop on a pap’s car last week) and yet here she is, getting huge, expensive freebies with the understanding that BMW wants the car to be photographed by the paps and talked about on the blogs. Interesting.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.