Quote:
Originally Posted by chrisny
Mainly just curious to see what stopping to 'refuel' is like for an electric car. Sounds like we're talking about a 20 minute pit stop to re-charge, provided you plan trips well enough around locations where that's possible. If that's the case, that's not bad at all. I see people re-charging at work, so was just curious as to whether this was a 'drive 100 miles, sit for 4 hours, drive 100 miles, sit for 4 hours' kind of thing..
What is intriguing to me about this car, would be if there is ever an i-x5 or whatever that would be called (electric X5). This would be great for my wife, as most of her driving is local. But the family car is also what we'd be using for vacations and weekend trips, so 80 - 100 miles wouldn't cut it unless we knew we could charge along the way without it adding 50% or more to our travel time (no desire to keep the kids in the car longer than we need to!). I did hear something on the c-net review about a program BMW offers to give you gas vehicles for long trips, so maybe there's promise there. But they'd have to make an i version of the X5 first, or at least an i5 or something, in wagon format.
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The i3 isn't designed for, or probably all that great for an extended drive. BMW has defined and has said they would offer the prepaid borrowing of a larger vehicle for extended trips, or even just for a few hours if you needed to carry more people or things. Whether that would work out or not would depend on your vehicle use patterns and where you lived relative to the dealer (mine is about 1/3-mile away). Cold weather does sap more from the batteries while trying to keep you warm in the vehicle (not so much for the actual driving the thing, but for heat and defrosting so you can actually see and be comfortable). Conversely, a/c isn't as bad. Long, sustained highway trips with little stop and go with no regenerative braking, up a long slope, with the cabin toasty, and you can suck some watts out of the thing fairly quickly. Cruise along on the flat at a lower speed, you'll go further.