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Over the course of 56,000 miles, I've driven on pure battery 96% of the time. My 2014 BMW i3 REx is now 27 months old, and the mileage on the odometer just recently surpassed 56,000 miles. I've needed a little over 15,000 kWh of electricity, and exactly 50 gallons of gas to power the vehicle thus far. That means I've driven on pure battery about 96% of the time, and managed an impressive overall gasoline consumption of 1,120 mpg. Normally I wouldn't highlight the gasoline use in my electric car; it's really not something most electric vehicle owners like to do. However, as many Chevrolet Volt owners can attest to, adding a range extender to a short range (under 100 mile AER) electric vehicle can expand its versatility immensely. While I haven't needed to use the REx often, there were plenty of times, especially in the winter, that I was very happy it was there. Back in early 2014, a few months before the North American i3 launch, I openly debated whether I'd...

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...

  Me & my MINI-E in 2009, my ActiveE in 2012 and my i3 in 2014. Five and a half years and over 157,000 electric miles (252,000 km), mostly powered by solar-generated electricity. It's been a little over five years since my electric journey began. I couldn't have possibly imagined where this was going back in 2009 when I was accepted in to the MINI-E trial lease program. I knew I was interested in alternative fuel vehicles, and I knew I wanted to reduce my personal consumption of oil, but I really had no idea if I'd like driving electric or if the industry would actually be making and selling electric cars anytime soon. Sure there were rumors that GM was going to make a plug in car that they were calling the Volt, there was a small start-up car company in California called Tesla selling an electric Lotus conversion for $105,000 and there were also a few new companies like Aptera and Phoenix Motorcars trying to bring electric cars to market, but nothing really seemed cer...

My i3 is powered by electricity generated by my home solar array. EV+PV is really a fantastic combination and one that I believe will be fairly common in the near future.  So how can you possibly top that? How about by getting two i3s and powering both of them plus your entire household's energy use by your  solar array! That's exactly what the Norby's are attempting to do. I have frequently written on my blogs how one of the best part of being in BMW's e-mobility test program for the past five years has been meeting and interacting with many of the other people in the program. Together we learned how to live with the issues that test cars frequently have, we built up our own support network and we simultaneously realized how fantastic driving electric was. It was a really a great experience and one that was nothing short of life changing for many of us.  While I've literally made hundreds of acquaintances in the program, there are a few people who I've really ...

Christopher on pick-up day! Born Electric 8/6/14 An EV Awakening Hi, my name is Christopher and I was born electric on August 6, 2014. In retrospect, ending up behind the wheel of BMW’s new electric i3 feels like it was inevitable.  If you let it, life has a funny way of getting you where you belong.  My path into an i3 took about seven years, but with the benefit of hindsight, it feels like destiny. The car I took to college in the late 80s was an I nka orange 1972 BMW 2002. That was followed by a jade green one, which I still vividly remember driving across the country in the summer of 1989.  I have been a fan of the BMW brand since those days and have owned five of them of various types in a continuous chain over the last 30 years.  For me the design, the handling, the safety, the quality, the purity of focus, the racing heritage - all of these things made BMW a brand I kept coming back to.  I have also always been drawn to the geeky technical side of thing...

  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...