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Yesterday at EVS29 in Montreal, BMW announced an energy storage system which uses BMW i3 battery packs. The system can utilize a used i3 pack, or it will be able to be purchased with a brand new battery pack. Perhaps the best aspect of the program is the fact that if you own an i3, you can have your old battery pack built into the system when you upgrade your car with a new pack. I've been waiting for this announcement for a while now. I can remember talking with one of BMW's top program managers from Munich three years ago. We were discussing my home solar system, and how I'd been powering my MINI-E and ActiveE electric cars with clean, renewable energy from the system for many years at that point. He then asked me the question, "What do you think will happen to your EV's battery once it has reached its end of life?" I answered that I would imagine it would probably be taken apart and recycled, with the lithium being used for new batteries. To which he said, ...

The 2017 i3 comes with 40% more range than the current model. It's also available in a nice new color: Protonic Blue The worst kept secret of the BMW i3 is officially no longer a "secret". BMW has formally announced that the 2017 i3 will have a new, longer range battery pack. They are indeed using the new Samsung 94 Ah battery cells that I speculated they would five months ago . Just as I predicted the new battery pack is increasing from 21.6 kWh to 33.4 kWh, which in an increase in capacity of about 50%. However the range of the i3 BEV will only increase by 40% from 81 miles per charge to 114, which is less than i predicted. That's because BMW is now using a larger buffer (the difference between the total battery capacity and the usable capacity) and also because the car now weighs more (roughly 100 lbs more) because the new higher capacity cells weigh slightly more than the ones they replace.  The slight increase in weight will likely only have a very minor effect o...

The i3 is the most efficient production car available today Every now and then I have a reader send me an article they wrote and ask if I'd like to post it here. Usually it's not exactly what I'm looking for and politely explain why I won't be posting it and thank them for sending it nonetheless.  Occasionally I'll get something interesting though, like the post below which was sent to me by Robert Kasper. I think it's particularly timely since just last week I posted the Tesla/BMW comparison piece and I think this is an interesting follow up to it.  I hope you enjoy:                       Efficiency or Range?  You Can’t Have Both . …But Advanced Technology Can Help. By Rob Kasper In the world of electric vehicles, whether Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) or Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs), there is a clear trade off between range and efficiency.  ...