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I have to say that overall I am very pleased with my i3. It's living up to what I had hoped it would be, and after a month of ownership I'm convinced it was the right electric vehicle choice for me. However that doesn't mean it's perfect. In fact it's far from perfect, but so is every other car out there. As much as I really love my i3, I can probably list a couple dozen things that I would have done differently. Listed below are some of the top things that I'm not particularly fond of. I took this picture from an i3 display at the LA Auto Show. Somehow 100 miles turned into 82 miles once the production i3 was revealed. The Range . So let's just get this out of the way now. I'm disappointed that BMW didn't deliver a real "100 mile" electric vehicle as they had been promising. The 81 mile EPA range on the BEV i3 and the 72 mile rating for the REx, falls a little short in my opinion. If the BEV i3 had an EPA range of 95 miles per charge or gr...

Now that I've had my i3 for nearly a month, I'm starting to get a good feel for what I like and what I don't. My initial thought was to do one post with both the likes and dislikes at this point, but after assembling the lists, I realized I wouldn't be able to spend enough time on each topic if I did it that way. Therefore I decided I'd do two consecutive posts, with one for the likes and one for the dislikes. I'm tackling the easy one first, the likes: Adaptive Cruise Control With Stop & Go: This feature is really useful. It's kind of like locking in on the vehicle in front of you with a tractor beam and letting it pull you along. I've found it great for both low speed and high speed driving and the car will even come to a complete stop and accelerate again once the car in front of you does. The only things that aren't perfect is I've found it sometimes leaves too large of a gap in between you and the car you are chasing (for safety reasons...

After a recent 62 mile round trip I finished with a 5.0 mi/kWh consumption rating. I've never achieved such a low consumption rate on any other EV that I have driven. This translates to an astounding 200 Wh's per mile! When the EPA range and efficiency figures were announced couple months ago, the i3 became the most efficient vehicle available in America. Here in the US, the EPA uses "MPGe" as its official efficiency metric to compare the energy consumption of alternative fuel vehicles. That stands for "miles per gallon equivalent", and unfortunately most people don't really understand what it means or how that really translates to what the vehicle will cost them to operate. The consumption rate, or how many miles the car will travel on one kilowatt of electricity, (mi/kWh) is a metric that I, and many other electric vehicle owners prefer to use. i3 BEV EPA ratings Wikipedia describes the MPGe rating as follows: "The ratings are based on EPA's f...

The infamous Check Engine light of the BMW i3 REx Many people that order the range extender option on the i3 do so because they just aren't comfortable with the BEV i3's 81 mile EPA range rating. Personally I really didn't want it but my driving demands dictated that I really needed it. If the i3 had 15% to 20% more range I would not have ordered the REx and I suspect there are a lot of others that would fall into the same category as me on this. We know it's there and we aren't particularly proud of hauling around the oil, gasoline and the rest of the muck that goes with it. So the last thing we really want is to be constantly reminded that we have a gasoline engine in our shiny, new electric cars. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening. The day after a picked up my car the check engine light (CEL) illuminated for a few hours and then shut off. I called my dealer as soon as it went off and was told to bring it in so they could check it out. Then when it tu...

The new look Before the wrap   A few weeks before I took delivery of my i3, I announced that I would be getting a complete body wrap for it shortly after I took possession. I was never really in love with the color choices that BMW offered for the car and also didn't particularly like that the hood on all of the cars was gloss black, regardless of what color you chose, so I wanted to see what the car would look like monochrome and with a more bold color. Laurel Grey looked better than I thought it would! I do have to admit, once I started seeing the i3s in person at dealerships, the colors BMW selected did begin to look better than I expected. In fact, my Laurel Grey i3 looked so good, I had reservations about going through with the wrap after all! The Frozen Blue accents look great and the Laurel Grey is a very dark grey, which nearly eliminates the color difference of the black hood, making the car look all the same color from only a short distance. I had it done at Designer...

I was recently interviewed by Brad Berman of Plugincars.com about my initial thoughts on my i3. The interview just went live on the site so I've bought it over here for my followers to read. Please leave your thoughts on my answers in the comments section. ____________________________________________________________________________ Tom Moloughney, long-time EV driver and first owner of a BMW i3 with the range-extender option, answers fundamental questions about the car. 1) How is the BMW i3’s range-extending system different from the Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid? The range extender on the BMW i3 works differently than systems on plug-in hybrids (that to varying degrees sometimes power the wheels from the engine). The rear-wheel-drive i3 is the only pure series plug-in hybrid currently available. The i3’s two-cylinder range-extender engine never mechanically drives its wheels. The Fisker Karma worked this way, but that vehicle is no longer in production. 2) ...

The Introduction Of The BMW i3 Helped May Set A New Plug-In Selling Standard (Above: First i3 REx Delivered To US -mine!- shown) Note: This post was written by Jay Cole and first appeared on InsideEvs.com. The news was just too good not to share here! The times, they are a-changin! Since the start of the ‘current generation’ of plug-in vehicles in the United States, no one month has ever failed to delivered an improved result over the year prior.  Ever. Including this month, that number is at  42 and counting. More Than 3,100 Americans Hopped In The Front Seats Of A New Nissan LEAF However May still caught anyone who follows the EV selling trends off guard, as what had been expected to be a solid month turned out to be the best selling month of all-time.  Any month.  Any country. In total just over 12,000 plug-ins where sold, compared to the previous all-time high set in August of 2013 when and estimated 11,273 moved onto American’s ...