Three years with a BMW i3
An experiment in optimism
The following is a review of my beloved BMW i3, which I felt I had to write, having grown up reading UK car magazine reviews and videos, and finally having an interesting car that I’m sad to be parting with. Hopefully someone thinking about getting one will stumble on this piece and find it interesting.
Large automakers are usually quite conservative. Customers express their wishes, and it’s the job of the marque to build products that captures customer demand as best as they can. This trend has been increasing as the industry has grown. There was a time, though, when automakers were able to build cars that ignited the customer’s desire: people didn’t know what they wanted, and the automakers made them want their product.
Back in 2013, a small electric hatchback from Munich came out, and I think that to this day it represented one of those rare occasions when a major company bet on something truly risky.
In order for you to get the picture, you have to image what the automotive landscape was back in the day. Tesla makes approximately twelve cars a year. VW is banking on its clean diesels. Fiesta ST vs Clio RS debates are all the rage. Change is in the air, but the industry’s as conservative as it ever was. And yet BMW decides to execute with confidence on its “Mega City Vehicle”, investing heavily in carbon fiber ventures and offsetting manufacturing CO2 in both Germany and the US, where the carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic is shipped to and processed into part of the i3’s chassis.
In recent years we’re perhaps more used to risk taking from major companies, but that’s because the global landscape is more precarious than it has ever been, and even so, change largely comes from legislation rather than creative inspiration.
At the time, it felt fun and optimistic. In a sea of ever-homogenizing vehicles, I was so glad it happened. It piqued my interest in a way cars don’t often do: I wasn’t primarily interested in the canonical parameters most would use to measure a car. What fascinated me was its technology, how it was built, how it looked, what questions it answered and why those questions mattered.
The premise of the car is this: most people drive less than 30 miles a day, and their car should be focused on doing that, extremely well. It needed to provide zero pollution in urban areas, comfort and refinement for the usual slog to and from work, torque to take all the stress out of merging up to highway speed and away from the lights, and compact enough dimensions to make threading it through a metropolis easy. BMW’s solution was a rear wheel drive, B-segment, four meter long, lightweight electric car.
Enthusiasts and journalists rightly point out its lightness, its classic status, how its designers’ Skunkworks California studio was just the right place to dream up such a shape, free from the constraints of its conservative Munich analogue; but they also note that it must have been quite a financial drain on BMW.
Conversely, famed engineer Sandy Munro famously tore down the car bit by bit (his company’s findings are all published in a fifty-thousand page book) and analysed it. What he discovered was that it was built with large extrusions to keep the cost down, and hypothesised that BMW was making a profit selling the car for the, admittedly, high price it did.
His thesis is thorough, and well worth checking out. What he also found, curiously, was that to this day the i3’s seats are the lightest seats of any car he’s ever worked with.
The press at large found the car interesting, but that didn’t translates into the car being a hit with the public, and the little i3 sold in decent but still small numbers. After ten years in production, 250.000 were produced. Many said it then: it’s a new Audi A2, or, a car too far ahead of its time for its own good.
And yet, predictably. with this sort of love-it-or-hate-it products, the i3 has a loyal, fun online community, eager to convert more and more people into the now very depreciated city car. They succeeded with me.
Rewinding back to 2021, when the moment was right and I was getting bombarded with videos titled something along the line of “This cheap EV is a TOTAL STEAL” or “THIS BMW is the BEST car they make, and it’s 70% OFF!”. Clickbait usually deters me completely from what it’s trying to persuade me to do, but in this particular case, I simply thought “I know. I already know what you’re trying to say and I agree. Here’s my money.”
As time went on I started to regularly watch japanese reviews:
Cambodian off road adventures:
Americans pulling angles on dirt roads:
And read reports of how its sophisticated Samsung battery is perfectly fit for moon miles. Yes, I know it refers to the 94ah battery, but the 60ah battery in my car should be similar, just reduce the figures by a third. Such is life when you’re afflicted with a pathological obsession with cars.
Clearly, the fascination never faded. Its depreciation made it very appealing, and I decided to bank on the fact that EV tech is reliable, so I bought an early, cheap one.
I found a 2013 car, with 56.000 kilometers, BEV, (so without the motorcycle engine range extender at the back), Ionic Silver Metallic but covered in a dark gray, matte wrap (which I promptly removed within a couple of weeks), 20 inch wheels, brown leather and lovely clear wood “Suite” interiors, CCS charging, a set of winter rims and tyres, and official BMW Italia provenance: it was on display at Villa D’Este in 2014, plate ES378JH. The battery degradation was just 15% and the price was €16.500.
It was near Bologna. I live near Venice, so I jumped on a train and picked it up one morning in early November. The trip back required a charging stop but I didn’t mind: I was driving my very own futuristic Mega City Vehicle, listening to Autechre, feeling like I was in a late 90s/early 00s futuristic videogame whose cover had been designed by The Designers Republic.
Three years and thirty thousand kilometers have passed, and I’ve learned a few things.
Firstly, is the way the car drives.
It’s the size of a Fiesta, but considerably taller, most of its weight is low in the chassis, it sports conventional McPherson struts at the front and a multi link rear setup, and it wears 155 section tires at the front and 175s at the back.
This setup gives it a surprising big car feeling, with a very controlled, competent primary ride, with very little roll and pitch and plenty of traction all but the most slippery conditions despite the skinny tires and torque on offer. The same cannot be said, however, for when the road breaks up and its secondary ride enters the picture. Because it will do quite violently. Traveling across any kind of bumpy road in an i3 with twenty inch wheels borders on painful.
Part of the blame for this will of course be the stiff suspension setup, its short rear wishbones mean wheel travel is a scarce commodity, and low profile tires have no sidewall to aid comfort, but most of all - and this is a feature of the i3 whose negative consequences will impact other areas of the driving experience too - is the position of the centre of mass relative to the position of the occupants. The car is very small, with a low centre of roll, and whose occupants sit quite high. This translates into very pronounced head toss for every degree of roll or pitch of the body.
The weight of the car is distributed 48% at the front and 52% at the back, but to me driving it, it feels a lot more rearward than that. The prime suspect for this hypothesis is that its centre of yaw itself feels right on the rear boot, translating too into unpleasant head toss every time the driver turns the steering wheel. The car just never feels quite happy except when traveling straight, at moderate speed, and on pristine asphalt. There’s also the fact that its comically, 1970s-narrow front tires have to cope with a modern car’s weight and momentum.
I suspect its engineers tried to mask its quirky packaging and wanted it to drive like a sports car, but one can only do so much with such a compromised platform. Its steering - electrically assisted, of course - is unnaturally nervous off centre, making it tiresome at highway speeds, and the car is easily deflected by bumps, all in the effort to improve the turn in of a car that naturally isn’t that agile.
All this makes the i3 difficult to drive even remotely quickly on a broken road. I know this because if I don’t want my passengers to tell me to slow down and be angry at me, I have to slow down below the speed limit of many roads. This should not have been the case on a BMW.
I also remember one time when a friend was driving it, hit a pothole, and turned to me, pale in the face, “Shit. I’m so sorry”. It felt like the car had broke in two. He was gutted. I assured him the car was fine, and we drove on. It’s that kind of car.
Its intentions are evident in its throttle mapping too. The driver can choose between Comfort and two Eco Pro modes. Using the former makes the top few centimeters of the pedal extremely sensitive, making the car difficult to drive smoothly, and the latter is a touch too soft, but it’s the mode I prefer.
And yes, it will oversteer if provoked, but the systems will keep it in check and can’t be turned off, unless you go into a special “roller mode” that disables regenerative braking and ABS too. It likes to spin its wheels mostly on a straight line, though, as its chassis regains grip and loses it again in an unpleasant hoppy fashion when sliding laterally.
But a car is not just how it drives, especially a car like this. How is it as an object to own? How does it fit into your life? Well, the interior creaks a bit at times, and the aftermarket CarPlay options aren’t that great either. All else, it’s lovely. Stepping into the i3 on a cold morning and finding it already preconditioned and warm is a real treat. Pound for pound, I don’t think a better commuting or city car exists. Also, it’s never had a problem except for a dead 12V battery and two punctures, and it averages between 14 and 15 KWh every 100 kilometers.
The i3 begins with a specific concept and follows it to its logical conclusion. It’s a car built for the city, one full of public chargers, and for a person that can store it and charge it overnight. The battery needs to be charged whenever you can, because you need all the range you can get, and also because its battery management system needs the car to be plugged in to perform cell balancing. It’s got 50 miles of range in the winter and 75 in the summer, driving gently. It would look amazing parked on a street in Shinjuku at night, and out of place in a rural setting.
That world really doesn’t exist for many, but if you can stretch your own in order to make living with an i3 feasible, it’s a car that can make you feel like you live in the future, a world apart from the world. I’m privileged enough to have done that, and to this day, it still feels like the most modern motoring experience I’ve ever had. I regularly tell people it’s an eleven year old car and they struggle to believe it, and I’d love to drive to half a million kilometers on its original battery just because I know it could.
After a couple of years of ownership, I craved something that drove properly, though, so I bought a Series 1 Lotus Elise which I’m slowly, tragicomically, restoring.
The two complement each other well, but now I feel like I need something bigger and capable of driving long distances. In an ideal world I’d keep the i3, but I just can’t get a third car just for those longer trips. So the solution seems to delegate all that requires driving talent to the Lotus, and just get a do-it-all car that really does it all. Early Tesla Model 3 perhaps? Very boring, but those are getting affordable now, aren't they? A cheap Land Cruiser? A W126 Merc? Or sell both and get an Alpine A110?
There’s just no comparable car that feels as special, or is as interesting, and I’ll miss it dearly when - and if - I find a worthy successor.