When the new BMW i3 came out, my initial thought was: It’s an abomination. Not because it’s ugly or uncompetitive, but because it’s stealing a legendary nameplate established by a carbon fiber, range-extended, suicide-door quirkmobile and attaching it to a rather conventional electric sedan. “This is no i3. It’s nothing like it!” I shouted at a cloud, swinging my fist. But now, some new details of the i3 sedan have emerged, and it appears that maybe it is indeed worthy of the i3 name.
When the Jeep Cherokee KL came out, I wanted to vomit. It wasn’t just that the thing was hideous, it was that it was bastardizing a beloved name that had been established by arguably the greatest SUV of all time — the Jeep Cherokee XJ. But the new Jeep Cherokee KL was nothing like the XJ. Sure, it had unibody construction and some amount of off-road capability, but it was built on a transverse front-wheel drive architecture instead of a rear-drive architecture; it has fully independent suspension instead of dual solid axles; it featured a 2.4-liter inline four or a 3.2-liter V6 instead of a legendary 4.0-liter straight six; and it looked nothing like the old XJ.
I did a comparison between the two vehicles when the KL was still new on the market. I somehow managed to hide my distain for a vehicle that was clearly just stealing a legendary nameplate without doing the work to deserve it:
This is something that happens all the time in the auto industry, and I’ve since become a lot less precious about it. Does the new Jeep Gladiator deserve that badge given that it’s just a Wrangler with a bed? How about Mitsubishi and its use of “Evo”? What about the Chevy Blazer?
This happens all the time, and if I’m an automaker that owns a nameplate with lots of cache, why wouldn’t I use it? This brings me to the BMW i3.
I don’t need to tell you that the original 2014-2022 BMW i3 was a marvel of engineering, because I’ve written about that ad nauseam. It’s got a carbon fiber body, an aluminum skateboard down below, batteries between the axles, a gasoline range extender behind the rear axle, suicide doors, a sustainable interior made of olive leaf-dyed leather and a plant-based material called “Kenaf.” It’s an amazing machine, and I hope to always own one.
It’s for this reason that, when the new i3 debuted without a carbon fiber body, without a range extender, and with a conventional sedan shape and conventional doors, I was a bit appalled, especially after BMW executives were allegedly throwing shade at the original i3. How are you going to throw shade at a car but then use its name for your next car? Silly.
Anyway, this left a bad taste in my mouth.
But the bad taste is now gone, and I’ve fully come around to the new BMW i3. I never thought I’d say this but: It is deserving of the hallowed name.
First, here are some details on the new i3 from the story Thomas wrote in March:
BMW’s New Class architecture isn’t just a new design approach—it’s new underneath, too. The underfloor battery powertrain uses an 800-volt architecture, which unlocks more efficient, faster charging. BMW estimates it can DC fast-charge at up to 400 kW, while the company’s “Gen6” cylindrical cells can squeeze out 30 percent more range than before.
Because the i3 is a smaller, lighter car, BMW says it can get an estimated 440 miles of range out of its battery pack, going by EPA cycle testing. That’s 10% more range than the iX3. Should the i3 score that well in official EPA estimates, that range would make it the 5th-highest-range EV on sale in America right now. If you exclude all the heavy electric SUVs and their gigantic battery packs, the i3 would be second only to the Lucid Air Grand Touring, which still leads the segment at 512 miles of range.
But what I want to highlight is news that a China-spec rear-wheel-drive i3 allegedly managed to travel an absolutely insane distance on a single charge. From BMW Blog:
BMW’s Neue Klasse technology is making another impressive long-distance run look easy. Following an endurance test in which the new iX3 covered more than 1,000 kilometers without recharging, the electric SUV now has company. The China-specific i3 50L sedan has traveled even farther, covering 1,213 kilometers (754 miles) on a single charge.
754 miles on a single charge!
As BMW Blog notes, that equates to about 7.1 mi/kWh. My BMW i3 maxes out around 5 mi/kWh. More from BMW Blog about how the vehicle is actually rated to go over 600 miles in China’s light-duty test cycle:
The stretched electric sedan completed the endurance challenge with just 1% battery capacity remaining. It also averaged an exceptionally low energy consumption of 8.8 kWh per 100 kilometers, or roughly 7.1 miles per kWh. To put that range in perspective, the 113.4-kWh battery pack is rated for an estimated 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) in the CLTC test cycle, meaning the sedan exceeded that figure by almost 20%.
This is an insanely impressive car. Is it as impressive as the original i3? Of course not. This is just a conventional EV going far on a charge, whereas the old i3 was a concept car that made it to production. Still, what the old i3 represented was top-notch engineering, and in the modern automotive landscape, the very best engineers on earth are at Lucid and Rivian and Tesla and legacy automakers trying to eke out every last mile per kWh of battery capacity, so you could say that, like the original i3, the new one is on the cutting edge.
I’d be a fool to call that blasphemous.
Top graphic images: BMW; The Autopian
I fear the i3’s name is only legendary in the Autopian’s Slack channel.
You got my hopes up, I thought BMW had announced a range extender
I bet you can get more out of it if they put those skinny rims/tires from the OG on it.
Pedant alert: the word you are looking for is ‘cachet’, not ‘cache’. Sorry, this drives me crazy like grill versus grille.
Not to mention, though I am, it’s disdain, not distain. Sheesh, UVA engineers. I can say that because my dad was one.
like grilled cheese!
I love and pay for this site, but it could stand for better proofreading. Surely getting posts out on deadline is tough, particularly working understaffed (by one part-time copy editor, at least, to catch basic errors–and Jason’s wordblindness to properly using there’s vs. there are!).
Long live The Autopian!
I have read somewhere that the old landrover defenders grille was often used by overlanders to grill wathever they had right on the grille.
So could be both?
You know, you could care less about that!!!
Oh, another one. And I’ll confess to it when I was younger until I realized it was opposite.
While it certainly seems to be a front runner of the class for efficiency and range, I am pretty sure to get those numbers they were averaging like 25 MPH the whole time. There is no way real world in the US it would achieve that. Still impressive though, really interested to see the testing at highway speeds to see how far it can go.
There is probably a place in the US to do that. From Denver eastbound, for example.
Would be fun to find the most EV-friendly test road.
Depending on where you live, 25mph is highway speed.
The dozen people who thought the original i3 was cool are obviously very disappointed that the new one is so conventional.
I think it’s decent looking, if boring and inevitably completely infested with modern car nonsense. No interest in either one, despite my general love for those BMWs that didn’t suck. Which was not many of them post 2005 or so.
can i get one with a manual? har har j/k.The only reason I’m interested in an EV at all right now is because gas in CA is over $6 /gallon.
Yawn…
I anticipate hearing from 2020 David Tracy somewhere in the comment section soon. Maybe something about BMW owners and Shower Spaghetti eaters not comingling.
I’m gonna call BS on this. CLTC ratings are already extremely generous, there’s no way they smashed the rating without some pretty serious hypermiling.
Which is a shame, because even if it’s not a realistic number, it would still be interesting to see how they achieved it. Assuming this isn’t all a marketing stunt and the entire route was downhill or something like that, which I’m currently dubious of.
I’m assuming they went 35mph on flat roads or something
You can’t see my face right now but it’s the Press X To Doubt guy.
“Legendary”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
See also: “Holy Grail” 😛
“Legendary, Holy Grail, Michigan Rust Free ™ Jeep Royale with Cheese”
I’m interested in the battery cooling and whether it still uses a refrigerant loop rather than a heat exchanger to coolant, because the refrigerant cooling worries me on our 330e. I really do hope they have improved the real-world efficiency of these, because our 330e in electric mode is pretty bad in the real world. I have to really work to get 2.5 miles per kwh. Our Bolt and even my previous Gen 1 Volt were way better than that.
It’s not awful looking like some BMWs that made it into production over past decades, and 7 miles per KWH isn’t bad at all if it’s real. How exactly they managed to get that much efficiency is unknown to me… a full 2 miles beyond the Lucids which, IIRC, held the record till now.
That is outstanding, like twice my EV. If anyone had that technology, it would be in every EV by now. Best Tesla can do is a little less than 5.
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consumption-epa-vs-edmunds.html#chart
Need to convert to actual m/kWh by taking the multiplicative inverse.
Sorry but I sort of fail to see the connection. The i3… as “controversial” as the design was, at least was super obviously different, used some over the top building materials, had an unusual looking interior and of course- that exterior.
This new car is none of those things. In fact its barely a BMW. You take the badge off and it could be a Hyundai/Kia/Nissan somethingoranother. Its like BMW and to the same extent Mercedes have totally forgotten their own design languages and instead are now going for an almost anonymous, generic design instead.
Like I say in the piece: the connection is excellent engineering.
But will the consumer care or know. Thats what it boils down to: Does it work well and does it look good? And as far as engineering…. Is it? We’re talking about BMW, which for years has had some pretty major quality control problems. And they were very late to the EV game while companies like ( again ) Kia/Hyundai… even GM has further matured their own EV lineups.
I get when someone has a personal connection to either a brand or product of that brand. I still love my 1996 Tacoma…. but absolutely hate just about everything Toyota makes now- the Tacoma now a bloated mess. Its sort of the same with what I see here. A otherwise unremarkable looking, almost boring looking car that happens to be an EV. They totally missed the mark on styling and given the previous iteration was all those cars with buck teeth, they’re on a roll!
Engineering, sure. But robustness, repairable, reliable, et al. Perhaps not
But the Hyundai Ionic5 is also some good engineering. Does that make it related to the i3?
David: “The new i3 has a surprising connection to the rusty Jeep of my dreams”
Autopians: “Is it that no one but you likes it?”
David: “technically, yes. But also the Jeep also has four wheels”
But its fair…. because I will fight tooth and nail to proclaim my 1996 Tacoma is the best truck in all the land. Then again that’s just because its mine and I am emotionally attached to it. So I’m sure if Toyota got off their asses and sold a small truck in the US again I would gush about it-profusely.
Also: “I’ve bought three and sold two.”
IMO, the original i3 should have been an ulta-aerodynamic compact sedan sized like a 1990s Chevrolet Cavalier. Design it with a Cd value around 0.16, with the same frontal area that the actual i3 we got had. Dare I say 7 miles/kWh @ 70 mph is possible. Could have made it a pure EV getting upwards of 200+ miles highway range on the i3’s 33 kWh pack.
The new one nudges the name a bit closer to that, even if it is a larger car than the original i3. It has a 0.21 Cd, vs the 0.29 of the original i3. That explains the difference in miles/kWh, in spite of what will assuredly be a significant mass increase of the new i3 vs the old i3 as well as a slight frontal area increase.
How’s that compare to the i8?
The i8 has a Cd of 0.26. Frontal area is probably large enough vs the i3 that the CdA values are close.
Do we know how much these weigh? Excited to see this tech move downmarket, and given the level of depreciation new Bimmers tend to suffer from one of these may be available used sooner than later for the price of a new Civic.
It’s funny, when I saw this was called the i3 my mind didn’t even register the original i3. Just that it was an EV (“i”) 3 series.
And now that I think about it, i3 was a bit of an odd name for the original i3, since it was nowhere near a 3 series.
Anyway, seems like a solid EV.
My brain went the same way. The i8 made sense as a name for that car. The i3 probably should have been the i1
i1 looks too much like ill.
Exactly! All this is doing is applying the “i” to the (correct) 3 series. Agree the original i3 is neat and all, but it just shouldn’t have been given that name in the first place.
Maybe it should have been… iSetta
Can anyone make me a custom badge? I love this idea
Yup the abomination was using i3 for the old one and sullying the 3’s good name. This actually makes sense, given their use of i to indicate that it is an EV. Not that using i to indicate that it is an EV makes sense.
Gee, I hoped that I would find it had issues with coatings failing on Carbon Fiber causing the roof to leak. Because that sounds like something much more on Brand for David.
Hot take: I’ve liked all the Neue Klasse designs since they were first revealed. It think it suits sedans more than SUVs but they’re much better than the giant beaver teeth grilles of the previous gens.
It’s the rear and the interior that I don’t like. The rear is just not consistent with the front’s “heritage” styling. It’s just a pair of very long and very plain looking tail lights and the interiors are a complete disaster.
But the front and sides are good looking. Not E38/E39/E46/E53 good looking, but I take any improvement as a good sign.
I dont like the front, but the rear is just bland like you said. I keep seeing 3 series and thinking there’s no way the average person could tell it apart from a Malibu with the badges removed. The tail light design is just bad .
I don’t mind the rear too much. It’s not particularly exciting, but it’s not bad either. I agree on the neue klasse designs, it’s some of the bets BMW has had in a very long time. From the rear, 3 series have always been rather conservative but edgy. The e36 was handsome but somehwat resembled the euro Escort of the time. The e46 sedan tails always reminded me of a civic with an extra red element stacked on top.
754 miles on a charge?
Must be because of the 6 Chinese prisoners pushing it?
To the best of my knowledge, ICE does not have any detention camps in China to disappear people off to without a trace.
You know…. VW literally had to shut down a lot of its parts manufacturing facilities in China because slave labor was being used in those plants. Its a big problem and while it gets swept under the rug, its still very much a major issue there.
ICE does not, but Winnie The Pooh is certainly efficient at disappearing people. Hell in China they have execution vans. They can roll right up to your home or workplace and have you dealt with in a matter of minutes! How convenient.
I hear the big turd is asking GM build several thousand vans so he can copy his “good Chinese leader friend.”
Don’t give him any ideas….
Ah, so that’s what he’s doing with the $5000 check I was promised!
We will all be shitting dollar bills before that check comes in the mail…
Cut it with the whataboutism. China doesn’t need to import slave labor, they have plenty of Uyghurs and other disfavored peoples of their own.
Besides, ICE is *depriving* the US of cheap labor with its actions.
At least this i3 doesn’t exist concurrently with the old one, unlike say Ford’s attempt to cynically mine a half-century of something else entirely while it’s still there.
First time I saw one was late at night. Driving up behind it, I see three vertical taillight sections on each side, but nothing I immediately recognize. My first impression: “What the hell is this thing trying to pass itself off as a Mustang?”
Then I got closer, and yep, it was a Mach E. Oh…
Intellectually, I know Mustang is Ford’s trademark and they can do whatever they want with it, but as a passionate car person, I refuse to acknowledge the Mach E by its full legal name.
At this point, what annoys me most is that Ford clearly had no confidence in it. It’s a quite good EV all on its own, but Ford didn’t believe it so it resorted to watering down something else to make up for it.
Not to mention the issues that’ll arise when the eventual EV Mustang (coupe and sedan) comes out.
Until BMW re-learns how to make a goddamn interior I’m not interested in anything they sell.
I’m not sure which is worse the rhomboid screens or the cyborg-cloaca steering wheel.
Or the giant omnipresent long screen that takes up the entire top half of the dash from one side to the other. Absolute hell world. Who the fuck is asking for that?
No idea. I don’t necessarily mind it as a “dashboard” in front of the driver but I don’t see any useful reason for it to span the whole dash top. They still seem to be stuck on thinking people want some stupid faux futuristic flight of fancy in their EV interior. To David’s point I’ve driven the OG i3 several times when we had Car2Go in Seattle and those had cool thoughtful interiors that felt like they had tried to rethink how car interiors could be without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
cyborg-cloaca LMAO
I rode in a rental BMW 3 or maybe 4 and the interior was strange. I felt like I was in an overdesigned KIA. Disco LED lights and angular angles that made no sense. So weird.
That’s cool but the record is held by the Audi A6 e-tron at 831 miles 😉
Be ugly?
Break in innovative and expensive ways?