A bit unexpected but I have found myself now owning a BEV after never considering one until about 2 weeks ago.
Whilst a GR86 can quite easily be a daily, it does have some limitations, and I was left with a degree of guilt. Cramming people in the back seats seemed like punishment, having a 15kg bottle of BBQ gas buckled up on the passenger seat didn’t seem sensible either. I’ve found myself doing tip runs, a lot of stop start urban driving and short trips where the engine oil was barely getting to temperature, burning through fuel with less than 25mpg. This is not what I wanted to be doing in an 86. The options were to sell it on for something more practical, which was never a real option, the other was for me to go back to a 2 car setup.
Car 2’s sole purpose was to plug those gaps, it needed a hatch boot for bulky items, be automatic and relatively compact to deal with urban driving, have low running costs and the ability to ferry 4 normal size adults around in some degree of comfort.
I wasn’t short of ICE options, but I then thought about those short trips, sitting in traffic, and burning fuel unnecessarily , what about an EV? I set a basic filter on Autotrader to search for EVs in my price range and to my surprise over 1000 cars returned in the search.
My budget put me in a category which covered quite a few models, most completely competent and respectable, yet the only one that I was curious about was a BMW i3. It came across as a perfect solution.
Aside from its peculiar looks, I’ve never taken much notice of the i3, yet after watching a few videos and reading articles, it turns out it’s extremely clever and perhaps misunderstood, a genuine concept car put into production, which was well over a decade ahead of its time with some impressive design and material science.
The chassis is a carbon fibre tub, the batteries are modular, replaceable and use refrigerant cooling, which I think is still unique to EVs even today. At 1345kg it weighs the same as an ICE equivalent, 25% of the interior is made from recycled material, the seats are allegedly the lightest ever tested, including those used in aviation. The interior has won design awards, and owners reviews online are overwhelmingly positive. For a car nut and an Engineer this struck a chord for me. I was taken back by this pug faced fridge freezer.
Autotrader had options ranging from £5k to £21k and thanks to the UKs general resistance and wariness to BEVs, my budget just about stretched to buy, tax, and insure a 2019 facelift model with below average mileage and the largest battery available (42kWh) for £9k.
Aside from the journey home, I’ve only whizzed around town in it for a week but so far, I think it’s absolutely brilliant, genuinely fun to scoot around town in and guilt free. As the UK’s inventory of 2nd hand BEVs continues to grow, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a more widespread setup for car enthusiasts.
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. I've always admired these cars for the reasons you've outlined. I have a 2017 much loved 335D xDrive touring owned for 9yrs and which I adore but most of the journeys are just me, with occasional passenger seat occupant. Beyond that, we have replaced my wife's Skoda Yeti with a Skoda Karoq (with Varioflex seats - IYKYK) which is plenty big enough so the sensible decision would be to downsize the 335 but I could only do that to something with a similar amount of car cool, as measured through my peculiar eyes.
. My thinking was very similar to yours, I particularly liked the innovative engineering employed by BMW in developing the i3, not dissimilar to how Toyota develop their GR's .
