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The 2017 Chevrolet Bolt EV will be available for sale in less than a year. A five seat hatchback with a 200+ mile electric range with a base MSRP of about $37,000. Will the Bolt affect i3 sales? This week at the North American International Auto Show I had the opportunity to sit down with Chevrolet  Bolt EV Chief Engineer Josh Tavel. We covered a variety of topics related to the Bolt EV, which was the cornerstone of the Chevrolet press conference at NAIAS this year. I originally posted this on InsideEVs, but I believe the readers here would also be interested in reading about a potential i3 competitor which is coming to market in less than a year.  I started out asking Tavel what he felt were some of the biggest challenges his team faced with the Bolt. Here’s Tavel’s response: “This is a very different car.”  “You might expect me to answer this by saying one of the major components like the battery or electric motor, but that really wasn’t the case. We’ve been doing batt...

Believe it or not, this was an i3. Unlike the 328i that was also destroyed in the fire, it's difficult to tell that this pile of burnt material was once a car. One of two things usually happens when people see an image of an electric vehicle on fire or the remnants of an electric vehicle that had been on fire. If you're an EV supporter, you probably hold your breath and grimace a bit until you can read the article to learn what caused the fire and if anyone was hurt. But for many people who are unfamiliar with electric vehicles, they likely question the safety of EVs. They don't even have to read the article; they just see "EV and fire" together and the unfortunate and uninformed speculation begins. Luckily, since the recent electric vehicle movement began roughly 6 years ago, there have been very few cases of EV fires, and to my knowledge no one involved has suffered an injury. Other than a couple of incidents involving the defunct Fisker Karma, the causes of EV ...

  Occasionally I cross post content from other websites here (with permission of course) when I think the article is both interesting and exceptionally well done. Such is the case with this post written by Chuck Vossler of BMWBLOG about the repair process of the i3. I think Chuck may have taken particular interest in this story since he recently revealed to me that he has indeed ordered an i3 for his personal use. I have also been talking with him for the past year about his interest in solar electric and am happy to say he has indeed installed a solar array on his home and will soon be joining me in driving his i3 on pure sunshine, or "driving the future" as I like to say. Electric vehicles combined with solar electricity are such a fantastic combination, and adding the second one to your life is such a natural decision to come to once you have the first, as long as it's physically and financially possible to do so. The entire article and pictures below were written by C...

Virtually every facet of the i3's manufacturing process is different and BMW is evidently struggling to manage setbacks According to Jay Cole over at insideevs.com i3 production is currently 50% lower than expected at this point in time. Cole's source is Manager Magazine Online , a German Publication, which states the high rejection rate of the carbon fiber parts made for the car. The article goes on to say that BMW's recent announcement that the company will be investing another 100 million euros to increase the production of carbon fiber is tied to this issue. Manager also says BMW is only churning out 70 i3's per day which is about half of what they were hoping to be making by now. BMW began i3 production in October so they are four months in and now have over 11,000 i3's on backorder. Plus, US sales are only just beginning so it would appear that even if BMW gets the current problems solved in short order (and that's a big "if"), it will still pr...