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Fill 'Er up! I know many readers here have spent countless sleepless nights pondering the the age-old question: How long does it take to refuel a BMW i3's tiny gas tank? Well maybe not, but I have had people argue that driving the i3 REx on an extended trip would be very inconvenient because they would have to stop to fill up the gas tank every 50-60 miles. I've done quite a few road trips with my i3 REx, and stopping once an hour for a couple of minutes to refill the tank never really bothered me much. I wrote a post last year which detailed a 462 mile round trip I made to Vermont from my home in New Jersey and refueling was one of the topics that many people commented on. On that trip, I had to stop for gas a total of seven times, as I only recharged the car once, which was at my destination. I drove 111 miles on battery, 351 miles on the range extender and used a total of 9.87 gallons of gas, averaging 35.5 mpg. It was snowing in Vermont when we arrived In that post, I w...

Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday. While this blog's primary focus is the BMW i3, I occasionally sprinkle in some featured EV products and discuss topics not necessarily i3-centric, but are instead just general electric vehicle information. In light of the recent revelations that Volkswagen has been deliberately cheating on emissions testing for many years now, I wrote the following article for Green Car Reports . So far, no other automaker has been caught as VW has - with proof that they purposely installed a "defeat device" on the vehicles so the cars would curb their emissions only during actual emission testing. However it's fair game to speculate if other OEMs may also be exposed as cheaters now that the EPA knows what they have to look for, and how to expose it. It will certainly be interesting to watch this all unfold. In any event, Volkswagen is going to face huge fines for intentionally violating Federal emission standards and I wanted to...

Hi! My name is Steve and I was born electric on August 15, 2012. You highly intelligent, super savvy readers may be questioning my sanity. Or, at the very least, fact-checking. And those dubious thoughts are spot on. The above picture is me putting gas into a new kind of EV: a BMW i3. And those understanding of the i3 know that, in 2012, the i3 only existed as an internal tension at BMW between the maniacal engineers that thought a mass-market car could be made extensively with carbon fiber and the bean counters that believed BMW i was a financial money pit destined to ruin Team Bavaria. Eureka! EV Bloodline Our first three EVs were all-electric Nissan LEAFs.  Back in the summer of 2012, we started replacing our gasoline-fueled family hauler fleet. The second LEAF came eight months later, making us an all-EV household. My wife and I defiantly and definitively proclaimed that we would never again visit a gas station. Then in 2014, I traded my beta test 2012 LEAF for a rea...

Kris charging up at an NRG Fast Charge station One of the many things that Tesla Motors understands as well as anybody is how a robust Fast Charge network will liberate their customers from being on an "Electric Leash." Ubiquitous DC fast charging stations are, in my opinion, just as important as longer range electric vehicles. In fact, they may even be more important. BMW apparently shares that opinion and has recently announced  that they are getting into the DC fast charge game with a partnership that includes Volkswagen and ChargePoint, and will be installing fast chargers at 50 mile intervals on the East and West coasts to create "Express Charging Corridors." However it won't end with there. BMW is going to continue to invest in DC fast charge infrastructure here in the US, as they realize that they need to participate in creating the foundation for BMW i to succeed. As with most things EV-related, California is ahead of most of the US when it comes to DC f...

A BMW i3 and a Volkswagen e-Golf charge on DC fast chargers side by side at BMW Headquarters in Woodcliff Lake NJ. I wrote this article for Green Car Reports , where it was published a few days ago. The proliferation of a robust DC fast charge network is vital to electric vehicle adoption, and I wanted to give this story as wide an audience as possible, which is way I let GCR publish it first. Now that they had it for a while, I'd like to share it with the readers here. I was invited up to BMW NA headquarters by BMW product manager Jose Guerrero to try out the new DC fast chargers installed there. There are three of them, along with four Level 2 EVSEs, all of which are open to the public 24/7. A couple weeks ago at the DC Auto Show, BMW, Volkswagen, and ChargePoint jointly announced they would install about 100 DC fast chargers for electric cars. Their goal is to create “Express Charging Corridors,” on both the East and West coasts, by the end of this year. The most intriguing...

Today at the DC Auto Show, BMW announced they have partnered with Volkswagen and ChargePoint to begin what will be the largest roll out of CCS Fast Charge stations in the US. This first phase will consist of the installation of roughly 100 CCS Fast Charge stations, split between the East and West Coasts.  On the East coast, there will be locations approximately every 50 miles between Washington DC and Boston, and on the West coast the new "CCS Highway" will span from San Diego, CA all the way to Portland OR. All of these locations will feature 50kW dual-head Fast Charge stations, including CHAdeMO charging capabilities as well as CCS. In addition, these locations will have multiple Level 2 ChargePoint EVSE's, allowing the user to "top off" once the vehicle reaches 80% state of charge from the DC fast charger.  In addition to the "CCS Highway" locations, BMW is also going to install a network of their 24kW DC Fast Chargers at secondary locations which a...

The very first public display of the new BMW i DC quick charger BMW stole the show today at the start of Plug-in 2014  in San Jose, California by not only announcing a new DC quick charger that will charge an i3 to 80% in 30 minutes, but also by saying the use of these chargers will be free for i3 users through the end of 2015.  This is a huge step forward for BMW i and the EV movement in general. I have consistently contended that the mass adoption of electric vehicles will hinge on the deployment of rapid charging. Even though the majority of charging will be at a slower rate and overnight, for EVs to really be taken seriously by the masses they need to be capable of refueling in less than an hour while making longer journeys. Tesla and Nissan have already demonstrated that they understand this and have made significant investments in DC quick charge infrastructure, and today's announcement from BMW is proof that BMW also realizes this and appears ready and willing to j...

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) ...