Vehicle Review: 2017 BMW i3 with Range Extender
5Series.net takes the gas/electric city car on a romantic trip to the Texas coast.
You learn a lot about a person when you’re in a relationship with them for over a year. Their quirks, how they handle stress, whether their sense of humor jives with yours, their insecurities, and their ideal future.
You also learn a great deal of things about a car when you spend a week driving it, especially when you’re behind the wheel for several hours on a road trip. My girlfriend and I recently took a 2017 BMW i3 with Range Extender from Austin to Corpus Christi, Texas to celebrate our one-year anniversary on the coast. We both had a feeling going in an electric car (with or without a range extender) wasn’t the best idea. We were right. However, it was a learning experience in more than one way. In fact, I’ve counted how many lessons it taught me.
1.) Help May Be Close By, but Still Out of Reach
The day before my girl and I went to the coast was a series of disappointments and shouted expletives. I wanted to drive the i3 as much as possible on pure electric power. Otherwise, I thought I would be missing out on how it’s supposed to be experienced. Total range with a full battery and a full gas tank is 180–205 miles, depending on which BMW stat you check. BMW says there are more than 28,000 public charging stations in the U.S. A few of them were close by. The 2 or 3 grocery stores near me had one – each. So much parking lot space and only one little charging station. All of them were full when I pulled up in the i3. Thanks to my roommate, I finally found an open station further away in front of a community college only to see a sign telling me that it had a 4-hour limit. Not wanting to risk getting a ticket, I made sure to come back 3.5 hours later to unplug the car and drive away.
2.) Not All Charging Stations are Created Equal
The logistics service that BMW uses for media loaners was kind enough to give me a ChargePoint card that I could use at stations to get free juice for the i3. The one at the mall close to my place? That was an EVgo station; a Tesla owner decided to be generous and pay for my charging time because my credit card wasn’t cool enough to wave in front of the payment sensor. Level 2 chargers can fill up the i3’s 33-kWh/94-Ah lithium-ion battery pack in 4.5 hours. The types of stations I encountered and was able to use were much slower. A DC 50-kW station can give the i3 an 80-percent charge in about 45 minutes. That’s great for people who live near one. I wasn’t one of them. Even the BMW dealer that I went to on the coast didn’t have one. No wonder the i3’s called a city car and not a suburb car.
3.) The House Wins…or Does It?
I love my second-floor apartment. The rent is reasonable and it’s close to major highways and shopping centers. However, I hated it when I had the i3 because there were no plugs on the outside of the building I could use to recharge the i3’s battery pack. The evening before my gal and I set off for the coast, we took the i3 – with its battery pack juiced up to a quarter full – to a nearby friend’s house to charge it overnight using the included 1.4-kW Occasional Use Cable. Roughly 16 hours later, the pack still wasn’t topped off, leaving us 92 miles of pure-electric range. Nuts to it. We weren’t going to hunt for electricity during our trip out to the beach, anyway. We were just going to gas it the whole way once the battery pack was depleted.
4.) Pack Light
The 9.2 cubic feet of cargo space behind the i3’s rear seat runs out quickly when you’re packing car cleaning supplies, camera gear, and two suitcases. Luckily, the rear seatbacks fold down to expand luggage capacity to 38.8 cubic feet and make packing more convenient. I’m glad no one else was going with us because we wouldn’t have had room for them and their stuff.
5.) When Somebody Loves You…
The i3 can operate in three different modes: Comfort, Eco Pro, and Eco Pro+, which was designed to wring the most range out of the car. On the drive out east, I made the mistake of leaving the i3 in Eco Pro. I was literally a button push away from comfort. After long stretches of constant highway driving, the battery pack eventually ran down, causing the range extender to kick in. Unfortunately, in its efforts to conserve, Eco Pro mode cut power from the 170-horsepower/184-lb-ft eDrive motor, limited our speed (sometimes to as little as 55 mph in 75-mph zones), and shut off the AC. My girlfriend and I puttered along with the windows partially down. We were quiet, coated in sweat, and scowl-deep in misery – and moving slowly through it.
That didn’t stop her from looking over at me and gently grabbing my hand and holding it. When the person you’re with is hot and frustrated and wants to kill somebody (especially you) and they reach out to hold your hand anyway, that’s when you know they’re special (and you’re lucky). That’s love.
Once we got to Corpus, my girlfriend and I ended up having a nice time. We indulged in seafood, cooled off with some ice cream, dipped our toes in the sand, and let the waves of Corpus Christi Bay wash away the tensions that had built up over the course of the day. The scent of Nature’s brine floated in the air as seagulls glided and swooped through it. Our eyes were hidden behind our sunglasses, but the relaxed smiles on our faces were easy to see as we took in the constantly changing, sunlit horizon.
6.) If Comfort’s an Option, Choose It
The next morning, a heavy storm dumped rain onto Corpus. My girlfriend and I decided to head back to Austin. After charging the car at the hotel (which only had one external outlet that had power), we only had a little more than 50 miles of battery range. We hit the road. Thank goodness I put the i3 into Comfort mode. It lived up to its name. The AC blew cool, the power stayed constant, and the speed stayed legal and safe. We were both relaxed, which made me more receptive to the cabin around me. Even though my seat was manual, I was completely comfortable. My test car’s mix of Giga Cassia Natural Leather and Carum Spice Grey Wool Cloth brought high-end men’s fall and winter luggage and accessories to mind. As I discovered later while taking pictures of the i3, even the back seat was comfortable. The i3’s tidy dimensions made it easy to maneuver around other cars on city streets without any worries – as long as I looked around the thick A-pillars. The ride quality was gentle on streets and highways, but the jolts from expansion joints made their way through the bottom of my seat at nearly full strength. Instead of a droning CVT, the i3 – thankfully – had a one-speed auto. Whenever I needed to zip out of someone’s way or get up to speed on an onramp, the i3 had plenty of zap.
7.) Keep Your Pump Hand Strong
When you’re driving long distances, stopping to stretch your legs is a good idea, a suggestion. If you’re driving the i3 beyond anything that resembles a charging station like I was silly enough to do, it’s an inevitability. Do the math. Less than three gallons of gas go quickly, so my girl and I were stopping at every other gas station on our way back home. We probably added more than half an hour to our return just doing that. Eventually, we arrived in Austin, a stack of receipts in the glove box. It was a memorable trip (whether we wanted it to be or not) and an educational experience. My girlfriend and I learned how enraging the infrastructure around electric cars can be, that we can go through something frustrating without murdering each other, and that I should try to reserve a 5 or 7 Series for our next romantic getaway.
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