As you may have seen from my previous post I have now got a BMW i3 94Ah ReX as a replacement for the Renault Zoe EV.
I've been driving around in this for a couple of weeks now, following my usual driving pattern which comprises mostly local journeys in the region of 20-40 miles (incidentally, this is similar to most people's vehicle usage in the UK) but with no long journeys. Last weekend this changed as we decided to go and visit family in The Wirral, which is a couple of hundred miles drive.
In the past, I've tended to avoid long journeys in the EV because of the limited range. Part of this has been because of bad experiences in the past with charging stations not working, being busy, or not having the correct charging network accounts for them (something the industry needs to sort out). Note that some of these experiences are from nearly four years ago and, in many ways, the charging situation has improved in the UK since then.
With the lower range of my old Zoe, if you got to a motorway charging station and it couldn't be used (for any reason), your options for driving to another were often limited as you normally wouldn't have much range left. I've never actually run out of charge, but I've got very close on a couple of occasions.
The longer range of the i3 significantly reduces this "anxiety", and the ReX option pretty much removes it altogether: get to a motorway services and the charger is busy or out of action, you can just carry on to the next one. For those that don't know the ReX is a petrol-driven generator that feeds the battery and maintains the current charge level. It can be manually initiated but, normally, it automatically kicks in when the battery is getting very low.
Our journey was from Berkshire to Ellesmere Port which is approximately 200 miles. The nominal electrical range on the i3 94Ah is around 120-140 miles depending on driving style, speed, and other factors.
On the way up, we were very cautious. We were not in a hurry so we made more stops than we needed. Our first stop was at Oxford services mainly because bladders needed emptying. At that point, we had around 75% charge but we stuck it onto an Ecotricity charger for a bit anyway. That topped up to about 90% before we left.
Side note: Ecotricity chargers now use an app: you log in with the app and enter the ID of the charger that's printed on it, and then you can start charging and monitor the charging progress.
Our next planned stop was the IKEA in Wednesbury where we thought we would stop and have lunch and a look around the store whilst it was charging. At that point we still had about 40% charge remaining.
When we got to the charger another driver was just disconnecting. However, the Ecotricity app said that the "pump" was still in use. I plugged in and started it charging without the app, but was concerned that the other driver hadn't stopped the charging properly and I was using her remaining charge time. I couldn't monitor this with the Ecotricity app, so I kept checking the charge status BMW "Connected Services" app.
About 20 minutes into the charge, it appeared to have stopped, so I went back to the charger to see another driver disconnecting our car. He claimed the charging had stopped when he arrived, although I was not convinced.
The issue here is that the Ecotricity chargers sometimes lose contact with their central control system. In those cases, they seem to fall back to a mode where they work without the app (which is a good thing). The downside of this is that the charging is then fully controlled by the buttons on the front of the charger, which means anyone can stop your charging session. My suspicion is someone (likely the other driver) stopped the session early.
Anyway, at that point we had about 70% charge and, rather than get into an argument with the other driver, we decided to head up the motorway to another Ecotricity charger at Stafford services. We plugged in there and mooched around the services a bit until we had about 90% charge (about 20 mins), and then completed the journey to Ellesmere port.
I don't think the charge level dropped below about 40% at any time in the journey.
On the way back, we were feeling a lot more confident and decided to really test the range. I was planning to hit the M6 toll services, but the Ecotricity app showed the chargers there were out of service, so we deiced to go to Warwick services instead. It helped the range a bit that we were stuck in roadworks for some of the journey, so that limited the speed we could travel at. Where we could we would drive at 70 mph.
From Ellesmere Port to Warwick services was 122 miles. We started off full, but had been motorway driving all the way, and this reduces the range. When we got within 8 miles of Warwick services, we were almost empty with less than 5 miles range showing. When it got down to about 3 miles range, the ReX kicked in, although we hardly noticed; there was no noticeable noise and the only real indication was that the range gauge on the dashboard turned on. The range was then maintained at around 3 miles. We drove approximately 3 miles on the ReX power before reaching the services where we plugged in, grabbed something to eat and, after 45 mins, had a 95% charge which was more than enough to get us home. I reckon we used less than 0.1 lt of petrol.
The conclusion is that the BMW i3 is more than capable of doing this sort of extended journey without excessive stopping or anxiety, and with minimal use of fossil fuels.
It was also very comfortable to drive on the motorway and very quiet (the acoustic insulation against road/wind noise seems much better than the Zoe).
The regenerative braking on the accelerator pedal (you lift off to regeneratively brake, there is a standard foot brake as well) takes some getting used to, but is much better than the standard brake on the Zoe. It is clearly better at energy recovery as, by lifting off, it appears that you are optimally recovering energy. One the Zoe, the foot brake split braking between regeneration and traditional friction brakes and it was not possible for the driver to optimise this.
The one thing that I don't like about the BMW is the onboard navigation and entertainment system which, we both think, sucked. I'll probably write a separate blog post about that.
