BMW 330e 2016 Review - International

BMW 330e sedan
International Launch Review
Munich, Germany

BMW learned how to make hybrids fun to drive with the i8 supercar and now it’s applied that knowledge to the 330e -- a mid-size sedan that goes like a 330i but uses a third of the fuel, all without emissions in its electric mode. If only it wasn’t stuck with the cost-down 3 Series interior.

The Toyota Prius does its job nicely, but it’s inarguably boring. The (now discontinued) Holden Volt is in the same boat, but whatever crude oil it saves in driving has been spent in interior plastics. The price people have traditionally paid for being eco-friendly is a blanching of character.

A big part of BMW doesn’t think it should be like that. It started down this road with the i8 eco sports car and it liked the idea so much it transferred it into the 3 Series. (Oddly, it has skipped by the 225xe hybrid, though it’s hampered by the overwhelming dullness of the donor car.)

By about May this year, BMW Australia will offer a plug-in hybrid 330e capable of delivering 40km of electric-car range or ridiculous amount of range as a petrol-electric hybrid. It will post a 44g/km CO2 emissions figure and officially deliver 1.9L/100km.

And it will still whip through to 100km/h in 6.1 seconds and handle like a 3 Series should every time you arrive at that one fun corner that can just make your day.

It won’t handle with quite the precision of a 3 Series exclusively powered by a petrol engine, because it’s 160kg heavier, but it’s not far away.

BMW has buried the 7.6kWh lithium-ion battery pack beneath the boot floor, while the electric motor sits between the four-cylinder petrol engine and the eight-speed automatic, so the weight distribution is pretty close to stock. If anything, it’s a touch heavier in the back.

BMW has managed all of this by, effectively, taking the 320i powertrain, with its 2.0-litre, four-cylinder petrol motor, and putting the electric motor between it and the transmission to create a hybrid.

That joins the petrol engine’s 135kW of power with the 65kW from the electric motor to offer 185kW of total power (yes, we know they don’t directly add up, because they don’t directly add up).

More critically, the electric motor has 100Nm of continuous torque, but can overboost to 250Nm when it needs to. Add that to the petrol engine’s 290Nm and the car has a maximum of 420Nm – and that’s only 30Nm shy of the 3 Series flagship sports sedan, the 340i.

But what the 340i can’t do is run through town with no emissions. What it also can’t do is to convert a navigation destination into a brain teaser for the computer. The 330e’s brain is geared, in its default driving mode, to drain everything possible from the battery to get you where you’re going, because that’s the most efficient way to drive.

So it thinks about how much city driving there is on the way, how big the hills are, how much hard acceleration it might need to do, now many kilometres it will do on highways, where the petrol engine is more efficient and even where it might have to brake frequently.

It figures out where the electric motor should work alone and when it should be a support act for the petrol engine. It works through where the two motors need to work together and when the electric motor should harvest energy through the brakes.

It does all of this by judging the navigation route, including real-time traffic information, and giving the ECU a which-engine-to-use-now template for every drive.

Of course, it’s flexible enough to switch things up if circumstances (like, say, the angle of your right foot) change and there are even two modes of eco-warrior on board, one of which is more aggressive than the other. Max eDrive can rip up to 125km/h as a pure electric car, while the default mode’s electric-only power tops out at 80km/h.

Both numbers are a far cry from 225km/h, which is where the 330e runs out of puff, but the fun stuff is its 6.1-second burst to 100km/h.

It feels about that fast, even in its standard, default setting. Sure, you can drive it around with a light throttle, hoping to never hear the slightly clunky start-up of the four-cylinder engine, but then you might as well have gone all-in on an i3.

The beauty of the 330e isn’t that it’s capable of running as an electric car. The beauty is that it’s capable of running as an electric car while asking you to make very few compromises anywhere else.

You can think about it if you want to, toggling the operating modes between Auto eDrive, Max eDrive and Save Battery (to, err, save the battery’s charge), but there’s not much point.

If you plug your destination into the navigation and it looks like 400km of highway driving and 50km of city driving, the computer will save the battery’s charge anyway, knowing cities are the most efficient way to drive electrically and the least efficient way to drive on petrol power.

Not just that, but it will use its speed zone-detection technology in concert with the navigation to automatically flick the electric motor on every time you come into a new town. And then off again as you emerge out the other side.

It does it seamlessly, too, and you quickly forget the way all this stuff is thought about and just drive the damned car. And surely that’s the point.

Sometimes it’s quieter than other times, and the petrol engine can feel a little too gruff when it chimes in after a long-ish slumber, but that’s the only time you really notice where the seams join.

The positive part to compensate for that is that where the petrol engine has to wait until 1350rpm to hit its maximum torque on full throttle, the electric motor delivers its 250Nm of overboost instantly.

That means if you just drive it like a big-engined 3 Series and forget economy, the car will jump off the line where it once waited for the 2.0-litre’s turbo to crank up. And the electric motor has better throttle response than the petrol engine, too.

It can easily chirp the rear tyres before the traction control can step in and the car will cheerfully slide just enough to be entertaining before the skid-control gets in on the act.

The slight rear weight bias (51 per cent in the rear, BMW suggests) leaves it feeling like it has a little more roll steer than the standard one, but it’s still a fleet-footed handler.

Unlike its little brother, the 225xe plug-in hybrid, with its electric motor on the back wheels and the three-cylinder petrol engine driving the front ones, the 330e’s power is all delivered up front, then sent through the automatic gearbox. It’s a simpler, more intuitive way to drive.

It’s fast enough, too, and it’s got a charm about the way it delivers the performance.

There’s more. The variable steering that so blights the 340i isn’t standard here, and the electro-hydraulic steering is far better and more intuitive in the fun bits without losing anything in daily (commuting) life.

The brakes are strong and pad wear is increased hugely because the brakes only ever work on hard stops. Light-to-moderate stops and brushes are all done via the electric motor, which converts the energy and sends it to the battery. Even the transition point in the brakes where the friction bits take over is seamless.

It rides well, too, quite possibly helped by running on high-profile 205/60 R16 tyres that will almost certainly be upgraded by almost every buyer.

There are other things that aren’t so great. The boot is reduced to 370 litres, but with rear-wheel drive the 3 Series has never seriously threatened the A4 for luggage supremacy anyway.

The floor is flat, which is a bonus, and the rear seat splits 40:20:40 if you need to jiggle longer loads. You lose the space beneath the floor and the bit the charging cable’s bag (about half the size of a briefcase) takes up.

BMW counters by promising it will charge in three and a half hours on a domestic power point or sub-two hours on a fast-charger. It also teases by promising you can use the electric power to heat or cool the cabin via a smartphone app while the car is still plugged in, long before you even get to it. Perfect for Australian summers.

But its biggest shortcoming is nothing to do with electrical power. It’s that in an era of the new Audi A4, the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class and the new Jaguar XE, you have to sit in a 3 Series cabin that feels decidedly less premium than its rivals.

The plastics are all pervading and feel relatively cheap and there is even still an old-school handbrake. (If this level of cost-cutting is the legacy of ex-BMW development boss (now Volkswagen brand CEO) Herbert Diess, get your people’s cars now before you find them “decontented”.)

Otherwise, the biggest and most obvious compromise is that when the battery is flat (“flat” really means it’s slipped below its 5.7kWh of net operating range, because it’s never allowed to go properly flat), you’re using a four-cylinder petrol engine to carry around 160kg of dead weight. That means performance is blunted and fuel consumption climbs.

But for most people, most of the time, the 330e will do just fine.

2016 BMW 330e sedan pricing and specifications:
Price: $TBC
Engine: 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol
Electric motor: Permanently excited synchronous
System output: 185kW/420Nm
Petrol engine output: 135kW/290Nm
Electric motor output: 65kW/100Nm continuous, 250Nm overboost
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Fuel: 1.9L/100km (combined)
CO2: 44g/km (combined)
Safety rating: Five-star ANCAP