Probably the original source, it has more information, quotes from BMW chairman Harald Krüger (he uses the term "electrified cars", i.e. HEVs and PHEVs too). In the article, it is mentioned that 28040 units of i3-s were sold, which is the only full-electric car in BMW's line-up.

> BWM sells 28,040 electric cars, plus ~72,000 hybrids in sales year.

The only downside to the pre-2017 models is the range on pure battery is something like 60m; the 2017 edition roughly doubled that to 111m on a charge.

So far I have not need the range extender and have run it on electric only the past 2.5 months.

Also, it's exceedingly quick off the line - the fast BMW ever made 0-30 which is mostly when I need that capability. Also fun to see the look of shock on Raptor drivers faces when I zip by them in the blink of an eye.

I cross shopped the i3 to the Volt when I was looking and the i3 feels like a car you can only justify by looking at the badge, it's seriously overpriced for what it is. Getting it used helps to some extent, but only by so much.

Leasing EVs is also not a bad deal, there's people who've gotten brand new Volts for ~150 a month with a minimal downpayments.

Volt also gets 50-60 miles electric range. And can do full speed on ice unlike the i3 Rex

Wife and I tried a Volt, but the rear leg room was horrid. I'm 6'5" and need to put the seat all the way back. Though for $21k by kids can suffer behind me.

Holding out for the Hyundai Ioniq plug-in hybrid. Looked at Prius Primes, but the Toyota dealers here in flyover country are all assholes (to deal with), and they won't stock any.

I have a Leaf, but my wife calls it a golf cart and refuses to drive it due to range anxiety. Thus she wants a plug in hybrid.

This was in Santa Clara, CA. At freemont Chevy. I believe they sell the most volts of any dealer in the world.

Does the new federal tax bill preserve the EV credit? Last I heard it was chopped.

It's fine, I'd be very surprised if it was repealed, automakers would be left very unhappy since it's been shown time and time again, current EV sales are very reliant on those credits, and they're a powerful lobby.

BMW i3 max speed on it's ICE is 70mph. Which sucks if you’re going on a road trip. I've only used my volts ICE when going on long road trips.

The Chevy volt had no issues going 80-90 on it's ICE.

To me the major difference is that the i3 is only a commuter car. And a good second car. Whereas the Chevy volt can be your only car.

I.e. only use the battery to get the last 10-20 kph of your speed.

Hold will (try to) hold the battery where it currently is.

Both essentially do what you describe, use ICE primarily and the battery as a secondary. The battery mostly ends up only being used under heavy acceleration at highway speeds (ie, to get your last 10-20 mph of your speed).

I just bought a 2014 leaf with 36,000 miles for $9,000. But yes used battery electric cars are a great deal right now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/5s22yq/battery_capaci...

https://www.reddit.com/r/leaf/comments/48c37x/question_about...

They failed a NHTSA crash test and don't yet have a fix.

"5th-percentile women who are in the driver’s seat and not wearing a seatbelt (emphasis mine) [...] generally defined as weighing between 100 and 110 pounds and standing about five feet tall."

One advantage of the i3 I did not account for was a recent trade in by a coworker on their new X3. While they were upside down because the trade in dropped a lot the BMW dealers were quietly accepting at some predefined value as trades regardless. Your mileage may vary.

I love the REX concept and think its the best solution until batteries become faster to charge and a weigh a lot less. Seriously, who can think a thousand pounds or close to it is a good solution for a car

The other cars can have their own names. They don't have to call hybrids electric cars, nor do they (like Toyota) need to call their hydrogen-powered cars electric cars, either.

They're only doing this to be misleading, create confusion, and make it look like they're more ahead in the EV revolution than they really are.

However, if they continue to be misleading like this, then we and the media need to start using more specific names for battery-powered electric cars (BEVs, I guess), to make it hard for these car makers to abuse the term by using it to refer to something else. But even BEVs probably wouldn't work, because they'll then say "well, our gas-powered car has a battery in it, and it has electricity, so I guess we'll call it a BEV, too. Look here, we now sell 300,000 BEVs a year! Take that Tesla!".

I have seen some cars abuse the term PHEV. To me a car that gets a best case of 13 mi of EV-only range isn't really helping things (cough Volvo cough). But in general PHEVs are pretty much EVs with range extenders at this point. You could take out their engines and sell them as EVs if charging infrastructure was where it should be. We're seeing numbers that earlier BEVs came with in PHEVs

(Disclaimer: I've put over 40K miles combined on my 2013 LEAF and 2017 Model S).

A Volt is a Chevy Cruze with a Voltec powertrain. If a Volt gets in an accident, for the most part any old auto body shop can fix it as easily as any GM car.

Teslas have been totaled over routine fender benders because of complicated body work.

A Leaf is a BEV based on Nissan's B platform and is closer to the Volt in repairability.

There are Volts and i3s doing hundreds of thousands of miles without issue. The ICEs aren't hardly being pushed in PHEVs since they only need to turn on in nearly optimal performance conditions, and the technology there has been done to death, so they tend to be bulletproof.

EVs in general have lower maintenance costs because things like regen saves on brakes, and PHEVs inherit those lowered costs as well.

Overall maintainance costs end up being a complicated multi-faceted subject that's a little more nuanced than "more parts = more expensive".

> "electrified" (whatever that means)

Turns out it means, "burns gas" sometimes. Weird.

> That includes fully electric cars, as well as electrified vehicles like its plug-in electric Active Tourer 2-Series, Reuters reports.

is the euphemism for that. It's good news that the cars are selling well but it's basically so misleading as to be a flat out lie that those cars are electric.

Edit: Also, the Reuters 'source' for that is actually an article about US congress tax overhaul and has no number to back up the article.

Don't get me wrong it would be great if it had a proper battery but and it's a big but it's still a £34,000 car which is 1/2 of the starting price for a new Tesla model S in the UK and in all honesty after having the pleasure of driving both on more than one occasion the BMW is a much nicer car to drive, the car feels premium, the interior design is far superior and if I'll ever decide to actually buy a car to own rather than rent or use zip car on the weekends I would go for the iPerformance vs a Tesla in it's current state in a heartbeat.

I had a few short drives in an i3 and it's also a pretty good car, but I don't have enough time behind the wheel to form a good opinion and to me it's just too damn ugly. I really wish they would've dresses the i3 like a series 3 or 2 car.

The drive takes me on some of the best roads in West Sussex, with some truly amazing cars (think Lamborghinis from the 70s and 80s, Porsche Carrera GTs and old 911s) and as such you can imagine we're too busy having fun to worry about economy.

I can do the trip there and back in 3/4 of a tank (11l/100km, or 25MPG). However, I genuinely worry that if I bought a Model S I would not be able to make the same trip on a single charge. There is a video on YouTube of someone driving their 85D on the Nurburgring and in 10 minutes the car has gone from 90% to 60% charge. Given that these roads allow for a lot of throttle use I expect I'd run out after 100 miles at best.

Sure, you could argue that we should drive slower, more economically, with less throttle. However, if electric cars are going to be fun and appealing to enthusiasts I think electric cars need to start matching ICE cars when it comes to range under high load, and I think the leading cause of such poor range when driving the car in a more demanding style is the extra weight electric cars have to carry over their ICE counterparts (a P100D is almost 40% heavier than its ICE equivalent, such as a BMW F80 M3).

Finish, comfort handling and in many other ways it’s much lower than the high end series 3/5 yet alone 7.

BMW just like Benz has a big overlap between its series.

The model S is an amazing car but it’s handling is subpar mostly due to its weight and it’s furnishing is a joke compared to even entry level luxury sedans.

I saw a talk from the data guy at Progressive car insurance, he said that the only signal from their "black box" monitoring of drivers (opt-in) which predicted accidents was extreme braking. Not strong acceleration, not anything else.

That said, my driving instructor said "if you use your brakes on the autobahn in normal driving, you are doing it wrong". That is because you can see far and air resistance slows you down quickly enough.

High performance sedans, such as the Model S and F10 M5 don’t just need big brakes because of their speed, but also their weight.

2 piston calipers up front on either of those cars would be dangerous. What happens if the driver has to make a sudden stop? For this reason sedans and SUVs tend to have at least 4 piston calipers up front, 6 for performance models.

Never have I thought for a second, on road or on track, “Gosh.. I wish I had crappier brakes”.

You could compare a P100D to an F10 M5, which is 4,288lb - almost 600lb lighter than the Model S.

I didn’t realize the 7 had grown so much (126” wheelbase is nuts)

I really don’t see that many problems with comparing the Model S to either tbh.

Don't you mean above?

From an electric miles driven perspective they are worse only if not used in their ideal drive cycle, which is mostly short local electric powered trips and occasional longer gas powered trips.

And if taken as an indication of consumer sentiment toward plug-in vehicles, including PHEVs definitely makes sense, especially since people pay a premium for them over similar ICE cars.

If you've looked at sales, you might notice that Chevy Bolt (pure EV) sales tripled in the last year to pass Chevy Volt (PHEV) sales, which are flat.

I'd guess that for a lot of car buyers, practicality of a car (capacity, safety, comfort, convenience) are more important than high performance. All the PHEVs on the market meet the basic requirements for all of those criteria as good as or better than equivalent ICEs, and many can even beat equivalent ICEs in acceleration due to their electric drivetrain, if that's important to you.

And the Bolt is indeed great, and clearly pure EVs are the future, and PHEVs will be relegated to particular niches.

What? This doesn't make any sense. From wikipedia PHEVs have

> an on-board internal combustion engine and generator.

If the factory that makes these cars is building ICE engines and putting them in cars, and consumers have cars with ICE engines in them, then "from the technology perspective" there is a massive difference! A car manufactured to burn gas sometimes is not an electric car. The patents on the car have gasoline engines. The people who make it are investing in and building gas engines. The people buying the cars are assisting in development of gas engines. From a technology perspective there are huge, huge differences.

I'm not against the bridge technology. I get that it has uses. But it's not an electric car.

Right, that's why they are called PHEVs (Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles).

What matters is how they are used. If PHEVs are used in their plugin-electric mode most of the time (why would someone pay a premium for one if that weren't the case?), then they are operating essentially as electric vehicles.

> The people who make it are investing in and building gas engines. The people buying the cars are assisting in development of gas engines.

Unless one takes an oath not to ever be ferried in an ICE powered vehicle, I don't know how you can avoid indirectly financing the development of ICEs. Also, it's not like ICE technology itself is 'bad' anyways, just that its time powering mass market vehicles is coming to an end with the rise of battery electric propulsion.

ICEs aren't going to disappear as a technology, but will likely be focused on specific niches where they have utility, rather than in mass market vehicles.

It makes more sense if you drive one. The EV range lets you drive as a full EV for 99% of your drives, and a very efficient hybrid for long ones (since the battery can reserve enough energy to let the engine only work at it's most efficient range). I went almost 3,000 miles before needing to put gas in mine, and only needed that because of a 200 mile trip I took.

Once you exceed something like 25 miles of EV-only range, a PHEV is closer to an EV than a Hybrid.

I'm sure the driving experience of these cars is similar. That's not the point. The cars themselves are extremely different in their technology and manufacture. Calling a hybrid an electric car is misleading and wrong. It's a hybrid.

Edit: I'm no longer allowed to post, HN is telling me to "slow down". So here is my response to the comment below.

I am not misunderstanding how these cars work. I am aware of how they work. They are manufactured with a gasoline engine. Whether or not it is used by the end consumer is irrelevant to the point I am making.

A car that is manufactured with a gasoline engine is not an electric car.

The amount of investment needed to facilitate EVs on a grand scale involves orders of magnitude more money and manufacturing (which generates pollution itself) than PHEVs.

PHEVs will be able to reduce a huge portion of the conditions that we burn gas which create the most pollution.

The problem with calling a PHEV with 50 miles of range a plain "hybrid" is the public has a clear idea of what a hybrid is, EV range measured in feet instead of miles.

High range PHEVs are EVs that become hybrids when the battery dies. I don't have a problem with calling them electric cars as long as we also have the BEV designation when it comes down to specifications, because the net benefit of PHEVs become mainstream will be massive, and only serves to open the way for BEVs.

If plug in hybrids count but non plug in hybrids do not, then I disagree with you.

[edit: The title was just changed from "electric cars" to "electrified vehicle", which is an even odder way to put it, but at least most people know they don't know what that means without looking at the article.]