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The following is a guest post written by i3 owner Francis. I started the Born Electric guest post series back in 2014 to give the readers here a look into the lives of i3 owners around the world. To view past Born Electric guest posts, follow this link: Born Electric Hello, my name is Francis and I was born electric two years ago on November 13th, 2014. I opted for the BMW i3 with the range extender and I have been sharing my electric experience with my fellow Quebecers. I even did a lengthy post after my first year that covers pretty much everything. I'm also an owner that didn't code my i3 to change the range extender behavior in North America (some would call me crazy and yet I never had a problem with the REX). So why post again after my 1-year report ? Simply because this year was everything but usual. One question we all asked ourselves, what would happen if my driving habit changed, would my electric car still meet my needs? Ever thought about a family emergency? Would m...

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...

On a recent trip to Vermont I stopped at Prestige BMW in New Jersey on both legs of the journey. They recently installed two 24 kW DC Fast Charge stations that are accessible 24/7 and free to use. A robust DC Fast charge infrastructure is crucial for mass EV adoption. This is the second half of a two part post on BMW's infrastructure plans, current and future. Having spent time with BMW's EV infrastructure team at the LA Auto Show, (Robert Healey, Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Manager, Idine Ghoreishian, Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Specialist, and Cliff Fietzek, Manager of Connected eMobility) I posted the first half of this report last week. In that post, we discussed the East and West Coast Express Charging Corridors, and the just-announced ChargeNow DC Fast program. ChargeNow DC Fast: I reached out to Jeremy Desel, Director of Communications for EVgo, to discuss the deployment rate of the 500 ChargeNow DC Fast stations . What Desel told me was pretty impressive:  ...

A few weeks ago at the LA Auto Show, BMW made news by announcing a partnership with NRG's EVgo to install an additional 500 DC Fast Charge stations in 25 major US markets. The project is called the ChergeNow DC Fast and is actually the second phase of a program started in 2014, which brought 100 DC fast charge stations to select California areas. I was there at the show for Press Preview days, and had the opportunity to sit down with basically all of the top EV infrastructure managers at BMW of North America. Seated at the table were Robert Healey, Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Manager, Idine Ghoreishian, Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Specialist, and Cliff Fietzek, Manager of Connected eMobility. Even though the news of the ChargeNow DC Fast program had just been released, I wanted to first talk about the East and West Coast Express Charging Corridors. If you remember, this program was announced back in January at NAIAS  and the press release stated that approximately 100 stati...

This CCS DC Quick Charge station is located on my property at 148 Valley Road, Montclair, NJ Back in August I posted an article  that announced the opening of the first DC fast charger in the East Coast Express Charging Corridor . That station was installed in Hartford, Connecticut. The Express Charging Corridor when completed will connect Washington, DC to Boston, Massachusetts with CCS DC fast chargers, located no more than 50 miles apart, and is being funded by a joint venture between BMW, Volkswagen and ChargePoint. About three weeks after the station in Hartford was installed, I installed one on my property in Montclair, NJ. It was the first public CCS station in the state that wasn't installed on BMW property. BMW has had a few CCS fast chargers at their North American headquarters for a few years now, as they have been testing CCS since 2012, when they were using a modified BMW ActiveE with CCS capability as a test mule for the then yet-to-be-released i3. So far the DCQC sta...

An i3 sits next to a 24kW DC Fast Charge unit during the announcement of the BMW, VW & ChargePoint joint venture earlier this year.  It's been seven months since BMW, along with Volkswagen and ChargePoint announced a joint venture which would install roughly 100 DC fast charge units on the East and West coasts. While there's been a lot of work identifying potential locations and negotiating with site managers, there hasn't really been any tangible progress that electric vehicle owners could see.   The plan is to create "Express Charging Corridors" on both coasts, with DC Fast Charge stations placed no more than 50 miles apart. The East Coast Corridor will connect Washington DC to Boston, Massachusetts and the West Coast Corridor would extend from San Diego, California to Portland, Oregon.  There would be two kinds of DC Fast Charge stations utilized. The stations placed directly on the highway locations of the corridors would be 50kW units, most of which will...