The state of California forced BMW to replace the bad battery in the 134,000 mile BMW i3 I purchased for an absolute song. It was the cheapest i3 ReX in the country due to its mileage, but as I mentioned in my last article, the car is in very good shape inside and out. With a new battery, it’d be almost like I got a brand new BMW i3 for just $10,500 — the deal of the century. But not so fast: I first had to test the battery, which the dealership allegedly replaced in 10 days after initially telling me it’d take six to 10 weeks. I charged up my new little luxury economy car and drove it for the weekend; here’s what it was like to drive, and here’s how it went on a single charge of its “new” battery.
Upon receiving my BMW i3, the battery was completely depleted. The dealership had driven the thing to LA from San Diego, and had arrived on the gasoline range-extender (a little scooter engine under the rear floor that acts as a generator to power the electric motor after the battery dies); the end of that drive must have been rough given that the ReX can really only generate enough juice to propel the vehicle about 55 MPH, but then again, it may have been gridlock anyway. Anyway, the first thing I did when I got the keys was plug the little Bavarian carbon-fiber-wonder in and wait for the pack to fill up.
Of course, on my 100 yard drive to the charger, I couldn’t help but obsess over the car’s interior. “It feels special” I say in The Autopian’s YouTube video above (please subscribe!). There’s just something about the seating position, the beautiful wood dash, the incredible leather-and-wool seats, the white steering wheel, the big dashboard, and all the nice features like power-folding mirrors and heated seats and navigation — the interior is just a game changer. I consider it the i3’s trump card, and a huge part of what won me over in the first place.
The 7.7 kW charger I have at work took some time, but it didn’t take that long, as the i3’s battery is only about 22 kWh large (18.8 kW usable) — that’s a third to a quarter the size of a battery pack you’d find in a typical Tesla.
Some basic back-of-napkin math tells me that a full charge should take about four hours. Essentially, the 7-ish kW charger at my work really puts out about 6 kW. If it were able to operate at 6kW flat-out, a fill-up would take just over three hours (18.8 kWh/6kW = 3.1 hours), but that’s not typically how it works with charging — EV charging rates tend to taper off as the battery reaches its capacity (kind of like how you tend to pour more slowly once you’ve filled a cup close to its brim). Here’s a look at my i3’s typical charging curve:
So 18.8 kWh battery divided by 6kW charging is 3.1 hours; add in a bit to account for the tapering at the end of the curve, and four sounds about right. In my case, the i3 took about four hours and 15 minutes. Not terrible, especially if the car can do the 72 miles of range the EPA rated it at — that should handle three days of commuting for me:
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The vehicle estimated a range of 90 miles when it was fully charged! That’s absurd, as the EPA’s official EV range for the 2014 i3 with range extender is just 72 miles. Had the dealer actually replaced this battery in a mere 10 days?!
A reminder: When I initially test drove the car in early March, the car estimated a range of just 48 miles, so this seemed like a huge step up:
But there’s a reason why BMW i3 owners call the range estimate figure on the gauge cluster a “guess-o-meter,” so I wasn’t going to read too much into that 90-mile figure. I’d first have to start moving to let the vehicle learn my driving style and then adjust how far it thought I could travel on that single charge.
To start the i3, you press a button on the steering column just behind and to the right of the wheel (see above). Doing so activates a nice welcoming sound, and the gauge display begins to show miles traveled and estimated miles remaining on the battery, among other information. To shift into gear, you rotate a rocker forward for Drive and backwards for Neutral and Reverse. There are detents for each, so just push through the Neutral detent, and you can get into reverse without having to pull back twice — this is, in my opinion, one of the best vehicle shifters in existence, in large part because it takes up no usable space whatsoever and also because it’s highly intuitive.
By the time the car finished charging, it was dark out. I had loitered around the Galpin lot and eaten at Galpin’s Horseless Carriage restaurant (which is actually damn good), but eventually I got behind the wheel late on Friday, and it took only a few hundred feet for me to declare: The i3 is fantastic!
I genuinely believe the BMW i3 is the best deal in cars (okay, possibly tied with the base Ford Maverick, which costs in the low 20s, and gets amazing fuel economy while being legitimately cool). To be able to get an interior that gorgeous, to get all of those advanced features like adaptive Cruise Control and Park Assist, to get a complex hybrid powertrain with a 22 kWh battery pack, and above all to get a carbon fiber body on an aluminum skateboard — all for just $10,500? It’s absurd. It’s a lightly-used electric luxury car that’s built like a supercar, and all for just a low-five-figure price tag. It seems incredible in theory, and as a newly-minted owner, I can say that it is incredible in reality.
As I drove my i3 more, I fell more and more in love. It’s serene in the cabin, alleviating stress that I used to feel driving my old cars on LA’s wickedly busy surface streets and on its lane-discipline-devoid highways. “This thing drives like it’s brand new. Adaptive Cruise Control works great…I’m in love. I’m in love,” I say in the video while traveling 70 on the freeway. “I’m comfortable, I’m taking these highways in LA — I feel legitimately safe and comfortable, and I don’t have to pay $5.30 on gas.”
I will admit that the i3’s ride isn’t the smoothest, and the skinny tires tend to want to dart around a bit, so you’ve got to keep your hands on the wheel when traveling at freeway speeds. But still, I felt safe. The visibility is excellent, especially out of the front, and the seats are fantastic (though I haven’t road-tripped the car yet). I wish I had Blind Spot Monitoring, as the B-pillar just to the left of me requires me to look back to change lanes, but it’s really not a huge deal. The highway ride is good, and compared to that of any of my older cars, it’s more than good.
The following morning, I had to test something out. I never thought I’d own a car with bluetooth audio, much less one that can park itself, so I just had to know if that function worked.
I found some street parking, hit the Park Assist button, and slowly drove alongside the parked cars until I got a notification on the center screen that the car had detected a spot that it could fit in. I then stopped, activated my turn signal, held down the Park assist button, and let off the brake. Here’s what happened next:
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Holy crap! The car drove itself in reverse, the electric motor in the steering rack turned my steering wheel just so, and the car backed into the spot. I watched it all via the backup camera, which is a bit fuzzy due to some scratches on the lens, but still does the job just fine:
Once between the Mazda Miata and Toyota Camry, my 134,000 mile i3 actually shifted into drive (in an EV, this means the motor just spun the other direction), and the car inched forward, completing the perfect parking job. Look at how close the right wheels are to the curb!:
After my parking experiment, I headed off to Target to grab an air mattress from my college buddy Jeb and his lovely wife Giulia, who were slated to visit me the following weekend (they would join me on my hypermiling test in which we’d drive around LA as gingerly as possible to get as many miles out of my new i3’s battery pack as we could. Expect that video and article late next week!). Then I headed to my video producer Chris’ birthday party (Chris, shown in pink below, would also join me on the hypermiling trip, and actually become so frustrated with how long the i3’s battery would last that he ditched me — get ready for that story, because it’s good):
From Chris’ party, we headed to a bar, where I had a nonalcoholic watermelon-flavored drink in a place far fancier than I’m accustomed to hanging out. I stuck my pinky in the air whilst drinking — that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?
Anyway, peeking down at my guess-o-meter, I saw 65 miles of expected range after 30.1 miles traveled. Surely this car doesn’t think it can travel 95 miles — 23 miles higher than its EPA estimate — on a single charge, does it!?
The next morning, I headed to Ikea to snag some furniture, since I still haven’t quite moved into my one-bedroom apartment, and my clothes are all over the place. Here’s a look at how easily a new dresser fit into the i3:
From there, I hit the road northeast into the mountains to a place called Tujunga, where a reader named Steven and his wife Micah were awaiting me for dinner.
I threw the i3 around those twisty roads, though I kept the vehicle in Eco Pro + mode. This is the most efficient setting, which limits top speed to 56 mph, locks out features like air conditioning and heated seats, and dulls the pedal response.
On these nice roads, though, 56 was plenty, and the i3 — even with its skinny tires — felt nimble and fun.
I never touch the i3’s brakes — I mean that almost literally never. Letting off the accelerator pedal yields rapid deceleration, and there’s no way to change this. Regenerative braking is locked into “aggressive,” and if you combine that with adaptive cruise control that keeps you a set distance behind the car in front of you on the highway, the left pedal becomes more of an emergency-use-only thing.
The dinner with reader Steven was one I’ll never forget. It wasn’t just the incredible food that his wife Micah had cooked, it wasn’t just the beautiful setting in the hills just outside the city, and it wasn’t just our joy-ride in the i3 afterwards, it was the conversation.
Micah told me about her new cooking blog inspired by her Filipino upbringing, Steven told me about his time in the Marines and his love for cars, and then there was Jim, the World War II veteran. Jim sat next to me at the table, talked with me about his old cars (he had an old Chevy Camaro and a Ford F-truck, both of which he loved), and at age 101, he was sharp as a tack. He told me about his time flying planes, and about how long it took back then to get to Hawaii — much, much longer than it does today. He enjoyed the cookies I had brought from Ikea; I was glad about that.
It was a single dinner, but a memorable one with great people. I’m looking forward to the next one.
The following morning, as I commuted to work on the highway at about 70 mph, the guess-o-meter ran down to zero after a total of 86.2 miles traveled. I’d been driving carefully and rolling the windows down instead of using AC since it was cool out, but I wasn’t being that careful. I’d taken highways (which EVs hate — more on that in the next article), popped my drive-mode button from Eco Pro + to Eco Pro (which allows for speeds up to 75 MPH, heated seats, and HVAC functions) whenever necessary, and just generally gone the speed limit.
At about 86.5 miles, the gasoline engine under my rear cargo floor cut on and began acting as a generator to propel the vehicle (up to another 64 miles — see the gasoline guess-o-meter on the left), and thus the battery had died.
Eighty-Six and a half miles on a single charge — over 14 miles more than the i3’s EPA-certified battery-only range. This all but confirms that, despite not having fixed my broken front bumper clips, despite doing nothing about my rattly exhaust, despite making me buy my car before telling me about its battery health, and despite a few other confusing things about my purchase experience, my BMW dealer had indeed replaced my battery. And I had indeed scored the deal of the century.
Next week we’ll see exactly what this new battery has in it, as I take The Cheapest BMW i3 in America hypermiling to find out exactly how many miles I can go on a single charge if I’m very, very careful. My goal: 100.
Why I Bought My Currently-Broken BMW i3: LA Was Making Me Fall Out Of Love With My Old Cars
Maybe the EPA is right and the odometer is wrong. Better test it against a 20 mile course. But don’t trust your phone for the measurement. Go to a local high school and borrow their football team’s ten yard chains just to be sure. That would only mean moving the chains about 3500 times.
“Man buys non-shit car and is amazed by its non-shittiness!”
So happy for you, David. Having the i3 will free you up to have more classic car adventures, knowing that you have a comfortable, reliable vehicle you can go back to. The i3 is much higher quality in many ways than my FIAT 500e, but my reaction was pretty much the same as yours. Also, that auto-parking feature is sweet!
Gotta say that I am personally not a fan of the i3 or how it looks but I am very pleased to see you now own a vehicle that doesn’t run on rust, hope and damp spaghetti.
Getting above EPA estimate is rather wild! I am sure you already checked and it is not the case, but those numbers are more in line with what you would get from a 94Ah battery (EPA 97 miles) not a 60Ah…
The 94Ah battery will go a good chunk I further—particularly if new. My ‘18 i3 will easily estimate 115-140 miles of range in good weather (I’m in MA)
Oh! Wow… and those are… 120Ah numbers 😀 In theory the EPA range for the 120Ah battery in a REX version is 126 miles! For the BEV (pure electric) is a bit higher, at 153.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3
My back of the envelope calculation for David’s car was that starting from the EPA of 97 miles from a 64Ah battery in an REX version (like his), which tends to be under somewhat ideal conditions, and removing some of the real world use that you can see in the video, you can potentially account for a drop of 10ish miles, which is what he gets. To me it makes more sense than getting above EPA real world range.
I would not be totally shocked if the the dealer found a refurbished 94Ah battery that is below 100% capacity and used it instead of sourcing a 60Ah.
But I have been wrong in the past, and I most likely will be wrong again in the future 🙂
You really like that interior. Well welcome to a car you can sit in that probably won’t give you tetanus.
This is akin to somebody that has only owned/watched a black and White TV and then acquires a color TV and discovers what they have been missing !ヽ(͡◕ ͜ʖ ͡◕)ﾉ
And that person’s work is to watch TV all day.
It’s good work if you can get it! ( ͡• ͜ʖ ͡• )
An ever better analogy is a person that goes from an Outhouse to Indoor plumbing, in this case, a Toilet!
And his job was and is to shit all day?
David, I can’t believe you’re whining about the the lack of blind spot detection whatsis. I would have thought you would have done what us old truck drivers have done on our personal rides forever and went to NAPA and bought a couple small stick on convex mirrors and put them on. Problem solved! I hope moving to the big city isn’t rotting your hillbilly engineering brain! Loved the article other than that. Except for the parallel park assist. Just another example of dumbing down driving instead of perfecting a skill.
I’ve got a convex mirror on most of my other vehicles!
But the i3’s mirrors are too small to lose that real estate!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0855D8DX7/
The heater drops 20% off the range? In LA? Yikes.
Car Dealership Guy’s podcast had a great episode today on how bad traditional heaters can reduce range. Heat pumps are better, but still impact range.
Literally would you ever need a heater in LA though?
During winter months seeing daily lows in the low-40s is common, so yes!
David has become The E-topian.
Where is part 1
https://www.theautopian.com/remember-that-high-mileage-electric-car-i-bought-with-a-bad-battery-i-just-got-its-battery-replaced-for-free-heres-a-first-look-at-its-overall-condition/
I love Dave Tracy’s naivetivity. Oh i just happened to buy this I3, then noticed under Ca. Law it needs a new free battery. My address that happens to be another car dealer. And upon investigation this guy is putting this out on the interwebs. Hello BMW we have a problem. No problem the warranty covers it, rip a battery out of some dudes I3 and put it in now. I love how DT seems to think his internet article on a great car site that the dealership cant discover it. Hillarious
.
Your scene setting would be exactly why they wouldn’t take a battery from another car in my mind, the risk of publicly being caught out being fraudulent would not be worth the risk for BMW. Seems more likely that he was just bumped up the priority list of the dealership/BMW were aware of this site and DTs articles on the saga of his purchase.
Too late now, but could you DT have explored the possibility of the battery being upgraded to the 94 or 120Ah battery when it was being replaced?
They’re all the same size, just indicative of the improvements in battery energy density of the span of the i3’s life
It probably isn’t the 120Ah, but I concur that it does sound like he got the 94
I don’t think the size was upgraded, just sounds like a new pack. A new 94 pack would give even more range. My 5 year old 94 pack easily gets mileage estimates of 115-140miles in good weather.
So happy for you! What an amazing deal. I still think you got the EIC treatment. 🙂
So does it only have the Guess-o-Meter, or does it also have a battery % gauge or indicator? I find the GOM on the e-Golf to be fairly reliable, but there is still a standard “gas” gauge in the cluster that displays the actual % of charge left. If I am not vibing with the GOM I can look down at the gauge and then do simple math based on its range to figure out how much juice is left. It also has 4 levels of regen braking and on 3 & 4 the brake lights come off when you release the gas, level 4 is pretty much 1 pedal driving and where I like to keep it.
The i3 has a digital line scale indicating %charge, which as you say is a better indicator of range using simple maths, although the guess-o-meter is pretty accurate once it’s learned your driving style (and assuming you drive consistently).
Tell me more, tell me more
Did you get very far?
Tell me more, tell me more
Is it like a real car?
I love how David is in awe of basic amenities. “Not falling apart” is the new luxury.
David: Congratulations it seems you scored a viable car.
The BMW dealer must have a good parts man to source the battery.
It’s probably good to thank them.
Very jealous! Been looking for a cheap non-leaf EV and the pickings are slim here in SC. Let me know when you go to sell it in 2 years and you can join me on the road trip out here. Unless I build my own first…
One big question I have about regen braking: if you never touch the brakes, does that mean the car behind you never sees brake lights? It seems like it would be wise to program the car so it shows brake lights under “aggressive” regen braking, to let traffic know what’s going on.
Letting off the accelerator pedal actuates the brake lights.
What happens when you’re using cruise control and the car slows down on its own?
I know you didn’t ask me, but in our two cars with adaptive cruise control (ACC), the brake lights activate if the ACC activates the brakes to maintain the pre-set driving distance. Adapting from, for example, 65 MPH to 60 does not activate the brakes or brake lights.
Yep. Discovered this on my wife’s CX-9. For a long time I blamed stupid drivers for over-enthusiastically braking, but turns out it might be the car doing it by itself.
I don’t like that, although I know it’s necessary. It makes newer cars with one pedal driving look like their drivers are very nervous and brake too much.
or like plenty of morons I see every day who drive automatics using both feet, resting their left foot on the brake pedal -_-
There’s nothing wrong with driving automatics with two feet, but parking your left foot on the brake pedal is next level stupid.
When you see an EV with brake lights constantly coming on and off, it means that driver hasn’t yet figured out how to drive smoothly.
I think it’s dependent on level of regen, easing back on the accelerator, creating low regen to slowly reduce speed like easing off a traditional accelerator doesn’t trigger the brake lights, stepping off more aggressively, creating regen to a level in line with actual braking does.
This is how Teslas operate: If you very gently let up on the accel pedal, you slow down and the brake lights do not light up. This similar to coasting with an ICE car. Once you slow down enough past some threshold, the brake lights come on. I suspect most if not all EVs operate in this manner.
I’m deeply jealous David… I’ve been hunting for a well-priced i3 for months now in the LA area. Best find so far is a ’15 w/o REX at $16,900 asking (at a dealer) which feels like too much given that one like that would have been about 10-11K before the pandemic. Prices are coming down from the peak, but might not get down to pre-pandemic numbers of course.
Use it in good health, and if/when it comes time to pass it along (like maybe someone will offer you a Tesla deal too great to decline) please give me a holler… if I haven’t found one by then, I’d buy yours ASAP. 🙂 -Scott bcarter9@gmail.com
This article and vid improved my Friday, and I suspect my weekend will be even better for it! Congrats!
To David “Hollywood” Tracy:
As much as we love your rust-flaky misadventures, you’re a good guy and deserve nice things. I am glad you now own one. Enjoy!
I used to have an i3, and I would recommend giving it a hard brake once in a while so the brake rotors doesn’t rust. According to the dealership, that was the most common repair they did on them, since most people who drives them never ever use the brakes.
This is really smart advice.
It’s a bit strange to see you behind the wheel of a nice car that isn’t from the press fleet! Looks good. I like that interior too. The seats remind me of the new Volvo EX90, and I think that’s a good thing.
The picture near the top of the article with David in the car….I can practically feel the happiness radiating out from the computer screen. It’s the Christmas morning joy face.
Rolling the windows down vs. A/C – might be the wrong call. You’re ruining the aero (but I’m no engineer, I just stayed in a Holiday Inn Express once). It is funny watching you go from vehicles that could give you tetanus just from sitting in them to something that has a 21st-century interior and amenities. It’s like watching those videos of adults who have been color-blind all their lives suddenly being able to see color.
Sub 40mph, rolling the windows down is definitely the move.
Can you share the price tag on the new battery pack? Seems like that’s in important part of the great deal you got. Apologies if it’s elsewhere and I missed it.
covered under California’s extended EV warranty requirement
Understood, but whenever I’ve had warranty work done, there was still an invoice with the $$$ amount, I just didn’t have to pay it.