BMW i3 Prototype 2013 Review - International

It is the edge of the sword for BMW’s vision of a sustainable future. It’s the product of years of studying the needs of those living in so-called mega-cities (above 10 million people). It’s how BMW thinks people will want to drive in the very near future, with a spacious airy cabin, state-of-the-art technology and electric drive.

It breaks new ground not just by being the brand’s first electric car, but it also has a combination of a carbon-fibre body bolted to an aluminium chassis and it will have the option of a two-cylinder scooter engine to boost its range.

It will reach 100km/h in 7.2 seconds, has a rear-mounted 125kW electric motor with 250Nm of torque driving the rear wheels.

BMW will show the production i3 at Frankfurt this year after a gestation period that can trace its roots to 2007. And it is extremely nervous about how it will be received.

Building, effectively, two all-new architectures (an extruded aluminium one and a carbon-fibre one in a breakthrough carbon-fibre plant), asking premium prices and delivering about 20 percent of the range of a conventional car is bound to make you nervous.

And it didn’t help the mood at BMW when Audi announced recently that it was leaping back from the abyss of electric cars in favour of plug-in hybrids.

What’s more, the range-extender Hybrid version – which could be the only i3 variant made available in Australia come 2014 -- will add another €2000-€3000 to that in its homeland, but you can expect that its usefulness at abating range anxiety will easily repay that when it comes time to trade the i3 in.

It’s still a lot of money for a car whose cabin shape looks like it shares its philosophical roots with Audi’s long-dead A2.

Besides its electric technology and the development costs that have accompanied it, there is one glaring reason for the high cost-to-size ratio of the i3, It is so new in so many areas that it has a very restricted ability to share parts with the more conventional BMWs.

There is the steering system from the upcoming new MINI and a few other bits and bobs, but this isn’t going to be an easy car to pay for, even at BMW’s projected 30,000 cars a year. The only upside for the i3 is that it can share a lot of its (for now) unique pieces with the upcoming i8 Hybrid sports car.

BMW hasn’t revealed what you’ll get in terms of toys yet, but the price will bring you at least a digital instrument cluster made from a flat TFT screen and another large TFT screen in the centre of the dash (that serves roughly the same purpose as the multi-media unit in most current BMWs).

There is a clever air-conditioning unit and a sound system, of course, and it will also accommodate BMW’s latest generation of internet connectivity to let the i3 do things like find empty car parking spaces or charging stations.

But the reality is that nobody has really known whether it’s good or bad up until now. The first signs are that it’s a mix of both.

Lift the bonnet and you see nothing much bar a tiny plastic bucket-type storage area that looks like something you’d find in a Murcielago, but smaller. Ostensibly, it’s for carrying the charging cable, but most people will find it more useful for hiding their briefcases.

That moves you to the front seats, where you find they sit taller than the current B-Class Mercedes-Benz but feel extremely comfortable and are very light weight. Electric operation has been overlooked for weight reasons but that’s not a hardship.

The i3 is a millimetre shy of four metres long and 2570mm of that is contained within the wheelbase.

While the 360-volt lithium-ion batteries sit inside an extruded aluminium chassis frame, the electric motor, its gearbox (for the single 1:10 step-down gear) and its drive unit all sit in the rear, on or about the rear axle. That frees up the front-end so that the steering can turn the car around in 9.86 metres. Our experience showed that it turned well inside a 1 Series BMW.

There are large storage areas in the dashboard, including an open one on the top, beneath the multi-media screen and a deep, capacious glovebox. That’s just as well, because the cargo area is tinier than a MINI’s.

It has a lot of headroom and spectacularly good vision that is like an SUV, but airier.

The rear seat is a different matter. Yes, it’s an easy place to sit and it has plenty of headroom, excellent forward visibility and very comfortable seats – and it’s wide enough for three – but it’s not without its issues.

The biggest of them is the suicide doors. They create a very easy way to lean in to drop bags, tend to children or deliver Maccas, but they’re a little awkward to get in and out of with any dignity. The bottom edge of the door frame tilts up a little earlier than it might (presumably to accommodate the rear wheel) and you have to step up and twist around it.

It’s also made a touch awkward by BMW giving it just one door-handle, accessible to both the front and rear passengers, on the leading edge of the door (on what would be the B-pillar, if it had such a thing). It can demand a strange wrist twist to reach, though the little lever inside the front head restraints that flicks the front seats forward is a paragon of light-weight, simplified engineering.

But the biggest problem in the i3’s packaging is its boot space. BMW isn’t releasing figures on the actual capacity of it yet but after you’ve put one large sports bag inside, the rest of your luggage had better be of the small space-filling type.

There are three main types of chassis in the car world: a steel monocoque  (where the bit everybody sits in is actually the chassis), the aluminium space frame and the carbon-fibre tub.

The first type is the weapon of choice for volume car-makers around the world. It’s relatively cheap to build and strong. The second is usually reserved for luxury or sporting brands (Audi’s R8 and A8, Jaguar’s XJ and Lamborghini’s Gallardo, for example). There are also cars with a mix of both technologies, like Audi’s TT.

And then there are the cars with carbon-fibre tubs. They’re so exclusive that Ferrari didn’t even have one in its standard line-up until the LaFerrari. The Lamborghini Aventador has one, the Pagani Zonda has another and McLaren’s 12C and P1 share the same one.

The i3 uses, essentially, the most expensive two of those three chassis technologies.

At the core of it all is an aluminium chassis and then BMW sits a carbon-fibre bodyshell on top of that. If you remember old-school ladder-frame chassis types with steel bodies on top of them, this is a very modern version of that.

Firstly, BMW decided it had better assuage public fear by burying its 22kW/h battery pack a long way from anything that might hit it, so surrounded it with strong aluminium extrusions, then began forging and die casting and working at things from the ground up, all in aluminium with some steel and magnesium thrown in.

Then it decided to double down on the crash safety and to make the body out of a single carbon-fibre mould. Essentially, they’ve made a second chassis to bolt onto the first, aluminium one.

Franz Storkenmaier, head of BMW’s Light Weight section, said that the future might see these two technologies become one, but the original priority was to ease anybody’s fears that BMW was doing everything it could to protect the batteries in a crash.

But why carbon-fibre at all?

“A single carbon fibre can carry its own weight for a length of 200km if you hold it vertically. Obviously, you’d be well out into space by then, but a strand of steel can only manage a tenth of that,” Storkenmaier said.

“For the weight, it’s very strong and this is about 50 per cent of the weight of the same structure in steel.”

But BMW has taken it further and recycles the carbon-fibre offcuts in places the now-shortened fibres can’t be seen. The four inner roof layers (assuming you haven’t ordered the glass roof) are recycled carbon offcuts, with fresh, shiny carbon on the outside, while the rear seat bucket is made from the same material and ends up 25 per cent lighter than a glass-fibre version.

It’s the ambitious industrialisation of carbon-fibre, as much as buyer interest in electric cars, that will seal the i3’s fate.

Inside all of this, BMW fits its high-voltage (eight modules, each with 12 individual cells, adding up to 360 volts) electric battery very low in the car then connects it to the 125kW electric motor. The synchronous motor’s 250Nm is a higher figure than the Mini Cooper S produces and the electric torque arrives instantly, every time you touch the throttle.

While the battery pack is 230kg, the motor weighs just 50kg and doubles as a generator whenever the car is coasting to recuperate energy for the battery.

BMW has given the battery an eight-year, 100,000km warranty, which indicates the sort of annual mileage it’s expecting from its new electric baby.

BMW is really aiming at cities where the i3’s worst-case range estimate of 130km won’t be a problem. The best-case scenario is around 300km.

The reason for the variation is that there are three different running modes: Comfort, EcoPro and EcoPro +.

In Comfort mode, it will reach 150km/h, while it lops off 30km/h in EcoPro and another 30 in EcoPro +, along with gradually stepping up the regeneration and stepping down the air-conditioner, plus a few things that are trickier than that.

The i3 is rear-wheel drive, driving through lightweight, hollowed-out driveshafts and has 50/50 front/rear weight distribution.

There’s MacPherson strut front suspension and a five-link rear-end and the electro-mechanical steering system comes from the next generation of MINI hatch and the 1 Series BMW.

It sits on a custom-built set of Bridgestones that are 155/70 R19. Yep, just about as strange a tyre size as we’ve seen.

The i3 is an electric car, but it won’t always be that way. There will also be a two-cylinder range extender as an option, complete with a nine-litre petrol tank sitting up front. Neither of these things effect the range as the pure electric car has a big space where the range-extender engine fits.

The engine itself is from BMW Motorrad’s CT650 GT scooter and produces 25kW of power, which never arrives at the wheels. Instead, it simply powers up the generator to charge the battery and, BMW claims, doubles the range of whatever mode you’re in.

Given that BMW has had a succession of 1 and 3 Series EfficientDynamics editions, that seems quite strange. Are they trying to catch Prius graduates? Do they want those upset that Fisker went bust?

BMW is targeting mega-cities and expects the i3 to be a major player in the US (where it hopes to get 30 per cent of its sales target), plus China’s enormous number of five million-plus cities you’ve never heard of.

Then you twist the all-purpose control unit, mounted to the right of the steering wheel, forward into D and just go.

There is a tiny whine from the electric motor as you ease off, but ay noise at low speed is mostly from the tyres and mostly irrelevant. The i3’s a lot quieter than any internal combustion car.

It’s so quiet, in fact, that on the iPhone’s decibel meter app (by no means a forensic tool, but it’s a good indicator) it registered around 66 dBa at a constant 60km/h, around 72dBa at 100km/h and only around 78dBa on a full-throttle blast.

It’s so quiet that you start to question how fast you’re moving and you can imagine quite a few speeding tickets being given to i3 drivers until they grow accustomed to the lack of the normal aural speed hints.

The driving position is higher than in most BMWs and forward visibility is excellent. It’s an easy interior to use (well, BMW did cover the dash with a sheet but we snuck a few peaks), with no centre console and a flat floor sitting atop all those battery cells.

The seats don’t have much lateral support, but that’s not the life they’re born for. They’re born to feel comfortable in traffic and they do.

There are some myths about electric cars and performance is usually one of them. Not here.

The i3 genuinely punches from low speed and will realign the brain of anybody who thinks this kind of car needs to be dull. It isn’t.

It helps that it’s rear drive, but the i3 feels entertaining (even around our limited test track with its slaloms, chicanes and fast corners) and it punches hard any time you want it to.

Its 0-100km/h time is probably quicker than it needs to be and its 80-120km/h figure of 5.4 seconds isn’t bad, either.

The only issue with the powertrain, really, is that it sometimes develops a fluttery whine when you ask it for full acceleration, especially if there is still some steering lock on when exiting a corner.

But the ride quality feels firm and accurate and it soaks up the (admittedly few) airfield bumps with aplomb, even when the suspension is loaded up.

Its handling trends towards understeer early and loudly, with those narrow front tyres betraying centre of gravity every bit as low as Volkswagen’s XL1, and combines that with a bit of body roll. They are not flaws, but rather character traits and they’re both very easy to fix and very progressive.

There are differences in driving the three modes and the easiest one to spot is how much hotter it gets in the car with the air-conditioning off.

This is the sort of car that electric owners will be impressed with. It’s probably as good as anything out there, at less cost. Current Prius owners will find the range limitations a bit too restrictive as their parallel hybrid systems carries them further than either the i3’s electric or series hybrid layouts.

There is a place in the world for a car like this and BMW hopes (no, really hopes) that it’s a growing place. Measure your lifestyle honestly first and you might find yourself loving its quiet, comfortable, well-appointed, safe strength. But to buy an i3 on a whim expecting it to be a standard family-style machine is doing it a disservice.

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