Testing the BMW i3 Range Extender – with engine footage! A very HubNut electric car test
Welcome to HubNut. My name’s Ian. This is another used EV test. This time a 2016 BMW i3 with range extender. It’s my second electric car in um as many months really that has an engine. So, we’re going to find out how it works, what they’re like to drive. But first of all, just look at the styling. I think the styling of these, they were introduced in 2013, ended production in 2022. I think it’s just fabulous. Uh, it’s just nicely different. So, the styling is by Richard Kim, who is a Korean American. And, uh, I just love it. There’s just lines where you don’t expect there to be lines. It is, um, a four-door. So, we’ve got these big front doors and then the rear doors open like so. Fixed window, can’t be lowered, but you got these big windows at the front. Frameless styling, but can be. So, it gives excellent interior access. The body is made of reinforced carbon fiber plastic effectively and it’s all glued together by a collection of very clever robots in Leipig in Germany. But I think the carbon fiber itself was made in America. Uh it’s a fascinating concept. big battery underneath the car drives the rear wheels through an electric motor. But there is also an engine hidden in the back of there somewhere that fires up when uh the car is getting low on charge. When it gets down to about 5%, it extends your range. So, it’s not a hybrid. That engine cannot drive the wheels in any form. It is solely there as a generator. Come in a bit closer, you can see the carbonfiber tub. And then um in this section there is the battery pack. It’s 22 kW hours. That’s the smallest one they ever did. Uh the realistic usage of which is about 18.7 kwatt hours, I believe. It gives a range of about 70 or 80 miles uh depending on terrain and time of year. But uh might as well just take in this interior. Isn’t it amazing? We’ve got uh hemp reinforced um card for the door cards and it’s all exposed and uh very very touchable and I think it’s eucalyptus uh on the dashboard here. So uh a deep glove box down there. Lovely leather trim work and uh these seats again made out of recycled material I think from plastic bottles. This one’s a bit stained and a bit dirty, but it is a regular family car with um over 60,000 miles on the clock, but it looks like there’s lots of space there. So, I think I might hop into the rear and find out. Actually, the fairest way is to go in behind my seat, isn’t it? So, just pull the handle there. Opens nice and wide. Can’t open that uh without opening the front door first. And oh oh it’s a bit um bit tight for knee room but uh good head room back here. Uh so I do fit here quite nicely. It’s just with a seat set for me it is a little on the tight side but I suppose we have got to fit an engine somehow in here. I don’t actually know where the engine is. Should we play a game of hunt the engine? But uh couple of cup holders in the middle here. It is only a four-seater. And uh got the ISOIX mounts for a child seat. And uh the seat back will fold down to increase your load space. But uh yeah, I quite like these. Um Oh, that makes life easier. Why? Nothing to tilt the rear seat. The control is there. And uh that allows for a bit more space for the getting in and out. That makes it Yeah. a bit more realistic. But I mean, in truth, because there’s no B-pillar, you can just sort of slide in anyway. So intriguing. So we’ve got uh electric charge points and we’ve got petrol charge points. It’s an 8 liter fuel tank, so it’s actually really really small. In America, I think it was made smaller still. Uh so it still passed as an electric car. If the uh range on petrol was too long, then uh that wouldn’t be good. So uh they deliberately kept it a little bit lower. Right. If you were an engine, where would you hide? Well, let’s go hunting in the back first of all. So, we’ll open the hatchback. Uh, which if the rear lights go up there, must mean these turn into lights um when you open it. We’ll have a look at that later on. This looks likely. Oh, yeah. Right. Let’s just pull that out temporarily. And, uh, unfortunately, this is actually bolted in. So, uh, we’re not going to be able to see the engine. I don’t think I’ve got a tool to undo that, but you know, I’m going to have a look. Uh what’s under here? Aha. So, there is your dipstick for the uh checking of the oil uh on your little engine. Yep, that smells like engine. It’s a 647cc twin cylinder uh made by Kimco. And Kimco is actually a Taiwanese company and it supplied that engine previously for a scooter made by BMW. So engine from Taiwan. We’ve got bits of carbon fiber from America. It’s a very very global car. Well, as I can’t show you the engine, uh I’m either going to overlay some footage or um I’m going to get the owner see if he’s got any tools and we’ll see if we can have a look later on. I just want to see what does it look like. I’m curious to know. Let’s just take in the skinny tires. Got 155s on the front and 75s on the back. So, surprisingly narrow. Um, just find the key and I can open up the front luggage areaish. Yeah, there’s not a fat lot here. You can see windscreen wipers, which they do seem to change for right-hand drive. Look, they’ve cut them out for extra lightness. And, uh, we got a bag of charging cables. So, there is a tiny little frunk uh if you leave your charging cables at home. So, we got the ones there. I think that’s your 13 amp and I think it’s possibly got a type two as well. So, one to plug into a socket at home and one to use on chargers if you’re out and about. But that is about all that’s under here apart from your screen wash. So, jumping in the front, the first thing that strikes you is this enormous uh gear controller on the side. So, we got park is up there. That’s your stop start to start the vehicle. And uh this is your gear selector. So it um goes through the gears like so. Uh windscreen wipers much as you’d expect really and seal ourselves in. Buttons galore screens. Uh they got a couple of screens as well. I really like this steering wheel for a modern car. It seems to have a really slim design. Generally, I love the look of it in here. We got BMW’s iDrive, so menus and things, cup holders galore. Uh there’s storage under here. There’s uh storage in here and uh very easy to adjust it to where you want it and uh yeah, very comfortable seat of a little firm. So, uh it’s quite stylish in here. Hazard light check. Very very electronic noise. Uh got map reading lights up here and you can turn off the passenger airbag and SOS um in case of emergency. Nice big door mirrors, nice deep windows actually, and uh quite classy door handles, new electric mirror controls, uh buttons on the steering wheel, of course. So, it’s all pretty good in here. Let’s um start her up. [Music] Uh wake her up. There we go. And now we can go about the allimp important business of the windscreen wiper test. And uh yeah, yeah, it’s definitely set for right-hand drive, isn’t it? Um, notice it covers much less screen on the passenger side. Uh, lots of screen wash. So, we have got some dribbles of disappointment going on, but only mild disappointment. Good overlap. Uh, the triangle hidden by the mirror. Hello. Uh, so that’s all good. And, uh, yeah, I’m going to say that’s a good wiping performance. I like that. Let’s, um, swap around to the rear and, uh, if I can find out how to wash. There we go. Very effective. Nice little wiper. But you will notice the head restraints do block a little bit of uh rear vision. Uh I find nonetheless a satisfactory wiping performance. If you look at the view I actually get in the rear view mirror, you can see that the head restraints do rub a bit. Um I guess you could probably move those down if you felt the need, but okay. Wiping performance. Okay, then let’s get the old seat belt on and we can actually um take this puppy for a drive. I apologize. 56,000 mi on the clock. Not um over 60,000. So, rotate the lever into drive. Has got an electronic handbrake, but it doesn’t appear to be automatic and we haven’t set it. So, uh we’ll just use that as little as possible, I think. Set off around this uh rather rustic car park. This is at the George Pub. Thank you to George Pub for unknowingly letting me use your car park. It’s a very nice car park. Uh the stalks are of the toggle variety. So, uh they don’t stay in position, which means they just quietly stop activating uh as the um steering straightens out. But it’s um certainly very smooth, very quiet, very high level of refinement. Thank you, Mr. Bin Man. Certainly feels very um high quality, very refined, very quiet indeed. And uh I don’t know if you can adjust the levels of regen, but it has a pretty strong regen. In fact, it was initially too strong on the early i3s. It could cause the rear end to lock up, um which obviously is considered fairly detrimental to the handling in most cases. But uh yeah, it’s um a very nice, very quiet vehicle. Uh I think we can go up this way. [Music] It feels very, very special. It feels unlike any electric car I’ve ever driven, which this this wood, which I’ve learned is not eucalyptus. It’s just very carefully cultivated European wood. I don’t know what wood. If you know, let me know down in the comments. It just Yeah, it feels really nice. I love the driving position. It feels like you’re surrounded by glass, which is very unusual for a modern car. In total, they managed to make quarter of a million of these, which I think is very impressive. The biggest markets being Germany, unsurprisingly, followed by the United States. The i3 was the first of the BMW i’s. The second one being the i8. Uh, which actually had an engine. Uh, nice yellow Audi A2 there. Put the wipers in auto mode and we’ll see how responsive they are. [Music] Yeah, certainly feels very planted. Steering is very, very direct. And as we said, wind noise is um pretty minimal given we got so much frameless glass. These side windows are enormous. So, we’re cruising along now at 50 mph. The ride a little rugged at times. Uh the range is currently showing us 42 miles. It’s um just above um halfway. Uh what we were hoping to do and what I haven’t managed to do is get the engine to fire up. Uh I might have to drive quite a long time to um get that to happen cuz like I say, we currently got plenty of range. Uh there is apparently a hold mode which will hold the charge. So if you were driving on roads like this, um you can get the range extender to kick in early and make sure you’ve got range for driving around town when you get there. A bit like the uh Chevrolet Vault we tested recently. The range extenders can have issues. Oh my gosh. Bright yellow Hummer H2. Yeah, this is really nice. They uh the range extender Oh, lay bike. Just going to make use of that. Uh the range extenders engines can be a little problematic. Uh they are known for having the odd issue. I have to indicate left again to cancel. No, there we go. Little bit down and we’ll go. Oh yeah. Ooh. Yeah, that gets up to 50 uh very quickly. Really nice. That sort of electric shove. Uh very nice. And it weirdly it does kind of feel like you’re being pushed from the rear. Uh which of course you are, but uh I guess it’s because the front end isn’t scrabbling for grip cuz it’s rear wheel drive, not front. But yeah, I think a lot of the range extender engine problems are because the engines often don’t get a lot of use. This car barely uses its engine. Uh it has been used in the past for longer journeys, but primarily it’s used for local pottering and gets charged when it needs to be charged. So the engine doesn’t see a lot of use. So uh need to do more hard acceleration to get rid of the uh battery power. It’s only a 9 liter or 8 or 9 liter fuel tank. So, it’s not a massive range extender. I think the combined range of this vehicle is probably only 150 160 miles. So, the idea being that you can just go that little bit further to get to the next charge point. Uh whereas if you’d just gone for the pure battery version, uh yeah, every 70 mi you’d have to be finding a charger. So it’s just to give people a bit more confidence. They later dropped in the UK at least uh the range extender version because they were able to fit larger battery packs uh which kind of addressed the range shortcomings just by having more electric range. Well, I’ve actually managed to find out how to do it while we’ve been going in this clue. So, actually, you can navigate around this um quite easily while keeping an eye on the road. Lovely transit there. So, we now got the engine running cuz I’ve managed to put it in hold state of charge. And uh that’s pretty quiet. You can hardly hear that at all. That is certainly a lot quieter than the Volkswagen XL1, the weird little super aerodynamic baby supercar that Volkswagen made that has a two-cylinder diesel engine that just sounds like a cement mixer right behind your head. I don’t know if you can even hear it. It’s um pretty peaceful. We’re on a 57% um charge at the moment. Uh 34 miles of electric range. So, the engine’s running just to hold that. So, I guess that is the uh big advantage here that uh you can just keep your range where you want it to be. Downside being you’ve got an engine that needs servicing. You got to carry this engine around all the time with you. Uh and uh yeah, all that extra weight. I wonder if you get more boot space in the nonrex version. Would imagine. So obviously there is nowhere to put a spare wheel at all. So uh you are reliant on um the magic spray. Of course we’ve got different size tires front and rear as well. So you’re always going to have a bit of an issue, but certainly it is a lovely thing to drive. Um it’s got that BMW feel with the switch gear and just the overall vibe. It uh feels very very nice. I’m liking this a lot. I thought I’d probably like the BMW i3 and I do I’ve not really demonstrated is a turning circle. It is um phenomenal. Uh so if we go for a junction turn here, it’s like the rear wheel is just on the spot. It is um astonishingly good. handling is um given how skinny the um tires are, it handles really well and seems to grip more than you’d expect. Now, what really get the range down would be some fast motorways, but uh that was a brief burst of dual carriageway. We seem to have run out of that. And of course, as soon as I ease off, I’m I’m putting charge back into the battery again. We’re at 53 and a half% at the moment. And if for some reason it’s not letting me hold this state of charge, which is all a bit peculiar. These roundabout markings are the most ridiculous I’ve seen in my life. Where the 36 A36 meets the A361. I do love that electric shove. EVs are just the best automatic there ever was because you come to a stop and there’s just silence and uh it’s just seamless power. I I was worried it would feel a bit weward cuz it it is quite a high vehicle, but actually you don’t sit that high up. I thought maybe it would be a bit vanlike, but no, it does very much feel like a car, I guess, because the floor is fairly high to make sure there’s room for the battery underneath. Uh, actually, I think I’m going to go this way just for a spur of the moment cuz driving on these boring fast roads is boring. Yeah, steering’s got a lovely feel. Yeah, this is a nice car to drive quickly again because you’ve got that battery low down really lowers the center of gravity. You haven’t got any weight at the front of the vehicle at all. And uh having the battery between the wheels um really does give it a really good balanced feel. Something else is good is the overtaking shot. So we’re doing 30. If I put my foot down, that’s 60. So, uh, you just get that punch for getting around stuff. It’s really good. And no lag cuz, uh, you haven’t got a regular transmission. It’s a one-speed transmission effectively. There’s a lot to like here. In terms of prices, uh, values-wise, uh, you can pick these up for about 4 and a half. um as an older privately owned example, it’s not going to be perfect. And uh prices range up to about 12 for a much later one cuz of course they were still in production until 2022. So uh some of them are still quite young. Uh yeah, you get the choice. Uh do you want battery power or do you want range extender? And uh I think if you’re going for the smaller battery, certainly range extender is probably the way to go. But it depends on your use. I think a lot of people probably go for a range extender for that bit of comfort and then find they very rarely use it cuz uh so much of your driving is pottering locally. But yeah, it must be a bit annoying that with such a tiny fuel tank uh you’re going to have to um refuel and recharge. So number of petrol stations that offer both these days is uh on the rise. So that’s a good thing. But I think the tank is so small because the engine may get occasional use. It’s to ensure the fuel doesn’t go stale. And uh I believe the engine will actually force a run if it feels like it hasn’t run for long enough. So uh something to bear in mind. Well, there we go folks. A very enjoyable drive in the BMW i3. I’m still slightly annoyed I can’t force the engine to run. It’d just be nice to hear it. Haha. With the uh owner’s tool kit, we’ve managed to hack our way in. Uh we got the cover removed. Here is that twin cylinder engine. And I presume this is all the charger gubbins right next to it. There isn’t space for all this up front. So where your high voltage power comes in and is directed towards the battery. Fascinating stuff. Aha. We’ve just got the cover on. Uh, Dana’s managed to get it to fire up. There you go. That’s what the range extender engine sounds like. Don’t say we don’t do things properly on HubNut. A very interesting car. And as the prices come down sub 10 grand, very intriguing and uh a decent family car as well because uh if you got kiddy seats in the back, the pillarless design means it’s much easier to access the rear seats. So a very useful little vehicle that is really really nice to drive. So huge thanks to the owner for uh Dan for letting me drive this car and I look forward to seeing you in a future video. Farewell. So, the rear lights obviously we’ve got them there, but as I open the hatch, the indicators transfer to down here. So, that’s that’s quite a nice feature. How clever. Right, I’ll go and run through the other lights. [Music] Wrong brake lights. There we go. Reverse lights. Parking senses. Shut up. Thank you.
The BMW i3 electric car was available as a ReX Range Extender version, which we test here – going to great lengths to uncover the engine and show it running in emissions mode.
But what is the i3 like to drive overall?
