BMW 2 Series eDrive 2015 Review

We weren’t mightily impressed with the last BMW plug-in hybrid we drove. On the streets of Munich, where BMW lives, on a route mapped out by BMW, we couldn’t get the X5 anywhere near BMW’s claimed 30km of plug-in electric range.

The pace of plug-in development is such that the X5 is relatively old technology for the people in BMW’s engineering departments, even though it’s not even in Australia yet.

The next thing they’re dealing with is this, a plug-in hybrid version of the 2 Series Active Tourer people-mover.

Given that it shares its front-drive UKLII architecture with the upcoming X1, the next 1 Series and the entire MINI family, you can expect this sort of technology to worm its way into the woodwork there, too. Actually, with an on-sale date in Europe of early 2016, it’s the most immediately relevant of all the technologies presented by BMW at its recent workshop.

The powertrain is effectively a mirror of the i8 sports car, with the three-cylinder turbo-petrol motor sitting across the engine bay and driving the front wheels while an electric motor power does the job at the back.

There’s a lithium-ion battery pack, too, so a fully charged 2 Series Active Tourer can live life as a rear-wheel drive electric car for up to 38km.

While it doesn’t have the mumbo and lightweight trickery of the carbon-fibre i8, the 2 Series Active Tourer eDrive isn’t slow. A 6.5-second sprint to 100km/h is pretty good, roughly lining up with the family’s existing 225i xDrive for pace as well as for powering up all four wheels.

It’s no detuned i8, either. Just the opposite. It’s a development of the powertrain, with a completely new electric motor and a development of the i8’s controlling software.

“We did this to define how we can integrate the hybrid into our front-wheel driven cars,” Uwe Seitz, the project director for the 2 Series Active Tourer eDrive, said.

“There is no point in having an i8 that drives backwards quickly. It is more than just a car that does that and we tried to get out of it as much as possible. And the architecture for all-wheel drive is actually better for us in this car.”

That’s because BMW has managed to deliver more mass over the rear axle, with 54 per cent of the 2 Series Active Tourer eDrive’s mass sitting at the back. That includes its lithium-ion battery and its 65kW/165Nm electric motor (which is behind the rear axle and has its own two-speed transmission), plus the generator (for harvesting braking energy) and the new control electronics. It’s a smaller, more compact motor than even the one in the i3.

The battery is a 7.7kW/h unit (though that’s gross – the net useful operating range is 5.8kW/h) sits beneath one side of the rear seat, while the 36-litre petrol tank sits on the other side. Yin and yang, so to speak, and the tank is now steel (not plastic) to manage the probability that it could remain full and untapped for months on end.

The front-end gets a 100kW/220Nm version of the 1.5-litre direct-injection three-cylinder petrol engine, with a generator attached to the six-speed automatic transmission that acts as a starter motor as well as assuring the high-voltage battery is never completely empty.

It can even help boost the performance in Sport mode, and if the driver pushes the accelerator through the détente, it can deliver an extra 15kW and 150Nm of torque, which is especially useful of the line before the triple can climb up its torque curve.

It’s also an outwardly simple way to deliver on-demand all-wheel drive to the front-drive 2 Series Active Tourer, even if it adds 150kg to the entire show. It allows for torque vectoring (though BMW’s hardly going deaf from the screams for it from the buyer base) and automatically turns on the petrol engine to deliver all-wheel drive whenever the car climbs a slope greater than about four-to-six degrees.

Aside from the weight, the only significant downside is the loss of 50 litres of luggage capacity.

Unlike the X5 plug-in, the 2 Series Active Tourer eDrive promises to be swift on paper and actually delivers swiftness on the road.

It defaults into the automatic setting, which BMW admits is the most economical of the three powertrain-management options. The others are the same as in the other plug-in BMWs, with a pure electric mode and a save-battery mode that doubles as a charge-battery mode where it needs to.

The auto mode benefits from the real-time satellite-navigation data to decide where to use pure-electric drive, where to get help from the petrol motor and when to keep a few kW/h up its sleeve for later on. Realistically, most people will leave a car like this in this standard mode because it just works and you don’t think much about it.

It starts electrically, with the sound of stones crunching underneath the tyres audible as it rolls out of the garage area because there’s no gear whine or fan noise to cover it. It’s that quiet, even though it’s been sitting still in 36-degree sunshine with the air-conditioner running to keep the cabin cool.

And it’s pretty sharp as an electric car. There’s the instant hit of torque you expect from a modern electric machine, which tapers off as speeds rise.

You have to push the accelerator down a long way before you talk the car into firing up its petrol engine and, when it finally does, it chimes in seamlessly, without a single noticeable trace of wobble along the way. It maintains the same level of good manners when it signs off again, too.

If you ease into it, the 2 Series Active Tourer eDrive can work its way up to 85km/h before it fires up the petrol engine, so it always feels relaxed and quiet and calm at urban speeds.

It sounds that way for longer in the Max eDrive mode, because the car can be pushed all the way to 125km/h as an electric machine, though the petrol engine is always on the other side of the accelerator détente, available for sudden bursts of acceleration.

The Save battery mode will hang on to 50 per cent of the electric capacity and range, assuming you’ll need it later. If you’ve already dipped below that, it will lift the petrol engine’s revs to bring the battery back up to 50 per cent. If you want more than that, you pull the transmission lever back to the S gate, and then the car will boost the battery up to 80 per cent – but it will cost you plenty in fuel consumption.

Keep it in the default mode, though, and it will deliver an NEDC cycle figure of just 2.0L/100km, which gives a CO2 number below 50g/km – not a bad result, given the comparably quick 225i xDrive Active Tourer posts 5.0L/100km.  BMW also says it’s good for 550km of fuel range.

The feels like a good, solidly engineered front-wheel drive car most of the time, even if it is being tested on BMW’s home track. But its Sport mode delivers both motors and a feeling of being planted, rear-biased and faithful like no front-drive family machine can really match.

There never feels like the time will come when either powerplant will overwhelm the other, much less overwhelm the car’s grip levels, and it will understeer eventually, but only when it’s pushed to silly levels.

The cleverest parts of it can be seen most clearly in Sport mode and when it’s running as a hybrid, because you have both motors working away, at different ends of the car, and doing it without even a hint of a seam or moderate disagreement. Everything just works, and works together.

“It runs on internally-written software, but it had to be rewritten off the i8 base software to co-ordinate the front and rear gearboxes,” Seitz explained. “The basic layers are the same as the i8 but the application is more specialised. It’s the next step up from that car.”

And, unlike most hybrids or plug-ins, that’s its greatest trick. It’s hugely complex to look at under the skin, but it’s never anything but simple and clear to operate.

BMW hasn’t priced it yet, obviously, but it does keep mentioning the flagship 225i xDrive, so maybe that’s the ballpark. If so, the eDrive Active Tourer will gain plenty of fans – at least among those in the market for a compact BMW people-mover, that is.