FAO BMW i3-istas

[Sundayjumper]

This is @Carlos & @Mito Man I believe.

I suddenly, slightly unexpectedly, have a window to add one to the fleet to replace the MINI. Usage would be daily short local journeys (<5 miles round trip) with occasional visits to in-laws (~70 miles round trip). We obviously have the RR for anything longer or needing piles of luggage.

It's a good use case for an electric or hybrid car and I'm a BMW fanboi so I don't need to hear the positives, if anything I need talking out of it

Budget plucked out of thin air is £10k 'cos it's a round number.

[Mito Man]

Hmm, the one I drove was a 2014 Rex which was the original smallest 60ah battery version. From that experience I can't recommend the Rex simply because the Rex portion of it kept having drivetrain errors which needed to go into BMW for 2 weeks at a time about twice a year. The petrol tank also pissed me off each time because it had to depressurise itself, which usually went wrong so I just ended up using the back up pull cable. Maybe the later cars were fixed.
I think it also wore out the battery faster simultaneously charging and discharging it at the same time.

The 60Ah version won't do 70 miles, you'd need a 94Ah for that. They're great for short journeys though and I think the purely electric ones don't have any problems apart from the AC compressors failing and I don't think you'll have the problem with snapping motor mounts every few thousand miles as they've been recalled and upgraded by now.

But fuck me, people say Tesla ship out incomplete cars for customers to test, the i3 was far worse!

[Carlos]

There's a couple of others on here as well.

£10k would get you a 33kw battery car which would safely do a 70 mile fastish round trip or an easy 100 pottering around town. I think they all had DC charging from around 2016 as standard.

You may get a 42kw for a bit more and you could hammer down the motorway at 90 mph and still do 100 miles and up to 200 in summer around town.

They all have heated seats, bluetooth, nav and a 8 year battery warranty although failure rates seem to be miniscule. There are a couple of specialist who can fix HV stuff reasonably as well in the unlikely even they break. Sunroof is a nice option but be wary of the interiors as some had weird wood inserts and horrible brown leather seats!

ETA they did a 22kw/60Ah, 33kw/90Ah and 42kw/120Ah as Mito describes them.

Most of the bugs were ironed by the time the 33kw cars came about.

Also the REx EML tends to come on from lack of running and stale fuel. It will go out if you run the car on Rex for 30 minutes and fill with fresh fuel but it just made me realise that i didn't really need the REx.

[Holley]

Wife has had hers from new since 2018. It's a 33kw rex that does about 80 miles electric only in cold winter and about 125 miles in the summer. Extender adds about 50-80 miles to this although she rarely needs it (probably only refill the tank twice a year).

It's been pretty much faultless and currently on 83,000 miles. Amazingly ours has never needed to be charged outside of home (but worth checking you get a proper dual charger with it as not all i3's have them except for one of those home plug in ones)

As a city runabout it's the perfect car. Rides well, fun to drive, amazing turning circle, quiet, surprisingly practical (have had hay bales in ours) and very cheap to run.

But not great on dual carriageways/motorways if there's a crosswind. That's pretty much the only negative I can think of.

[Sundayjumper]

Thanks all - and apologies to Holley for forgetting you had one too !

(but worth checking you get a proper dual charger with it as not all i3's have them except for one of those home plug in ones)

?

Is the dual charger part of the car ? I know nothing about this stuff (yet). There's already a hefty power supply to the garage so it should be no big deal to install a charging point at the front.

[Holley]

Thanks all - and apologies to Holley for forgetting you had one too !

(but worth checking you get a proper dual charger with it as not all i3's have them except for one of those home plug in ones)

?

Is the dual charger part of the car ? I know nothing about this stuff (yet). There's already a hefty power supply to the garage so it should be no big deal to install a charging point at the front.

I don't know the exact terms, but the i3 comes as standard with a three pin home charger. But this doesn't work with public chargers as you'll need one that plugs into the car and the charger (although some charging stations come with a charging cable you can use, most of the ones you see in car parks don't)

[Sundayjumper]

Ah, OK. When it's only doing local trips I think the 3-pin home charger will probably be fine. We might even get away with a single overnight full charge per week.

[Holley]

We did use the 3 pin charger for the first year which was fine as charged overnight.

A 7kw home charger will add about 33 miles range per hour. So this was useful when we used it more often and needed a top up in the afternoon

[nuttinnew]

Watching with interest.

Slightly off topic, a long time ago someone mentioned battery upgrades in Germany; I can't remember if they were a larger capacity than the i3 ever came with or if it was retrofitting later, larger capacity batteries into earlier cars, but this thread has me wondering if early cars will ever be cheap enough (and battery tech progressed enough) to buy with the intent of changing the batt. from the off.

[Marv]

My sister leased an i3 for three years and the only issue she encountered was the Bridgestone tyres easily picked up punctures.

They found it a bit silly that to open the rear doors, you'd have to open the front doors. But otherwise it worked really well for my sister, as she used it for the school run and trips to the local shops.

[Jobbo]

I can see the appeal. Have you also considered an electric Mini? Same basic drivetrain tech should mean it’s reliable and with EV prices dropping you might get a much newer one for your budget.

[Sundayjumper]

I hadn’t, tbh, they seem to start at £13k but are a touch newer for the price so that’s fair enough. However, I expect she’d want a convertible as that’s what she has now, and the electric convertibles only came out last year so they’re still £35k+. It’s a “no” to that

I like the quirkiness of the i3. I’d like to try one.

[Jobbo]

I'd probably also want an i3 over an e-Mini too; I did contemplate the e-Mini after ruling out the Honda E due to the Honda's slight issues and crap range, but I'd just want to get a Cooper S in preference. Or an i3 because it's really interesting. Would have to be the 42kW version and I'd want to test drive it because some people really don't like the way it rides.