BMW i3 94Ah BEV 2016 review | road test video

Tim Robson road tests and reviews the BMW i3 94Ah BEV with specs, energy consumption and verdict.

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On the face of it, an electric car makes a lot of sense if you only have a short drive between, say, work and home each day.

But as EV technology improves, can those shorter trips become something more?

BMW has just updated its i3 electric car to give it considerably more range – but is it enough to make it a viable alternative from the car that's in your driveway right now?

The i3, which costs $65,900 before on-roads, uses a new 94 amp hour electric motor to make 150kW and 250Nm, and BMW says it can travel up to 200km in real world conditions on a single charge.

How you replenish that charge, though, is one of the challenges of living with a pure electric vehicle.

Don't forget, the i3 isn't a hybrid – it doesn't have any form of back up for the battery in standard form.

If you want to go further, you'll have to pay attention to how you keep the batteries charged.

There are a few ways to charge the i3, but they all take quite a lot of time.

Plugging it into a regular household socket using the BMW's cable is the slowest method – it needs 14 hours to get to 80 per cent charge from flat.

BMW's higher-powered Wallbox can be installed in your garage, and speeds up that process to 8 hours.

And using a public charger like this one reduces the time to 4 hours.

It also has DC technology built into it that will charge the i3's batteries up to seven times faster again and reduce charging time to less than an hour – but that's still a little while away.

My semi-regular commute is about 75km each way, so theoretically 200km of battery range should be enough to get me there and back without needing to charge during the day. While some people have access to chargers at work, I'm not one of them.

But running an electric car is a lot like managing your smartphone – we've all had that sinking feeling when that battery bar sinks a bit too low.

The i3 can manage its power use in various ways. It'll turn down the climate control system when it can, for example, and the batteries can be charged via the energy generated by braking.

Battery power, though, doesn't behave like petrol. The i3 will use more energy on hot days, it can be affected by very cold days, and if your commute is hilly, the extra load on the motor will drain the juice more quickly.

Driving the i3 is really no different to driving something like a 1-series – except it's a lot quieter!

There's room for four people, but not much luggage, and it has satellite navigation and Bluetooth and digital radio and all that fun stuff.

BMW uses a lot of recycled and alternate material to make the i3, hence the finish of the dashboard top. I think this spoils the interior a bit, actually – it looks pretty terrible and it reflects up onto the windscreen on sunny days. The eucalyptus wood is pretty nice though.

My commute is pretty average – there are a few hills, about 50 kilometres of highway and about 20 kilometres of big city traffic.

Over three test runs, I've used on average 40 per cent of the range in each direction. This means that I can get to the office and home again in the i3, with some juice to spare.

I can't help but worry about that, though. What if I get caught in traffic, or get called away to another job on the way? That 20 per cent can disappear pretty quickly.

BMW offers a version with a small 2-cylinder engine that doesn't drive the car, but simply charges the battery when it gets low. Combined with a tiny 9 litre fuel tank, it extends the i3's range to 330km – and it's how BMW sells most of its i3s in Australia.

The verdict is definitely still out on the future of the electric car. Emissions regulations are only getting tougher, and zero emissions cars make a lot of sense.

The simple fact is, though, it's currently not easy to live with an electric car. There's no infrastructure in Australia, no government incentives to reduce the price of the car – and it takes a long time to "refuel" especially when you compare it to a petrol car.

The i3 is a great electric car, but I have the feeling that it'll be a while before my faithful petrol burner gets the elbow in favour of an EV.

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