Our Cars: BMW i5 M60 Touring

Sense of humour in tatters at my feet, I texted my mate Ben who goes everywhere by BMW i4 and asked him what I was doing wrong. He asked if I had conditioned the battery before charging (important on cold days to warm it sufficiently to take a proper charge). I had. He asked if I was at a high power charger. I was. He asked how busy the charging station was to which I replied that it was pretty much full, even though it was nowhere near a rush hour. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘then it’ll be because everyone else is stealing your juice.’

If you are an EV driver, none of this will surprise you. But the fact that the allegedly high power charger was dispensing energy at less than one tenth of its maximum potential certainly surprised me. But now I had no choice but to wait, and wait far longer than I either expected or had time to wait. So I put in just enough charge to get me to London and no more, meaning both that I’d be late to meet my daughter and would have to charge again on the way home.

The following day I reported to Heston Services just inside the M25 and a now largely deserted Gridserve forecourt. The first charger said it was being used by someone else, which was demonstrably untrue. But the second connected just fine and started charging at between 95-120kW. At that rate it didn’t take long to get enough range to get me home, which I did with just six miles range and two per cent battery capacity remaining, of which I was quite proud. But the truth is it took five chargers on two separate days to find just one capable of dispensing electricity at even half the rate the BMW is capable of receiving it.

What I find staggering about this – and EV users, I apologise for my naivety on the subject – is that even if you do all your due diligence, plan your attack with military precision, you can still arrive at a charging station not knowing whether it will take minutes or hours to fill your car. So I asked Ben, who travels a lot, how on earth he can ensure to be on time for any appointment more than 200 miles away to which he replied that he leaves a lot of extra time just in case…

I asked Dan too, whose Audi S e-tron GT can charge at up to 320kW. In theory. The reality is that he’s never once seen it charge at even 200kW. So really, above a certain point the speed at which your car will charge is an irrelevance.

And the real shame of this? I’ve grown to like the i5, and I mean really like it, far more quickly than I ever imagined I might. I like its looks, its ride quality is fabulous, it has overtaking performance that, 20 years ago, you’d need a Ferrari to match and a quick one at that, the interior works well, the refinement is awesome and the perceived quality superb. But in certain regards I am a rather particular kind of person and I hate being late for people even more than I hate people being late for me. It’s just unprofessional, inconsiderate and rude. So why should your own car now add itself to that list of things for which you have to leave extra time just in case? Like airport immigration queues. Are our lives not already strewn with enough of these occupational hazards?

But of course it’s not the car. Yes BMW does have a bigger battery on its shelf (a monster 105.7kWh unit used in the i7 compared to the 81.2kWh pack in the i5) but even if it could be made to fit, it would make an already heavy car even heavier, you’d still have the problem when you stopped to charge and it would take my little Pod Point home charger 16 hours rather than the current 12 to completely replenish the battery. And that’s not good enough.

I am not now, nor have I ever been anti-EV and now that I’ve spent time with the i5 I think that for beasts of burden such as this, their potential is actually huge. Moreover the car makes the charging process as easy as possible (prompting you, for instance, to condition the battery when it knows the charge is low and it’s cold outside), while apps like Zapmap make finding the locations of the quickest chargers (and even how many are currently available) childishly simple. But even with all this going for you, if there’s little or no electricity when you get there, you do find yourself wondering how anyone who needs to do distances puts up with it.

And maybe that’s the point right there. I’ve said before that the only way an EV can fit family and working life is to have off-street parking and access to another car. This is great if you’re one of the lucky few to be in that position. But what if you’re not? Government can regulate all it likes, and the idea that these people can somehow be forced to abandon their ICE cars and spend huge amounts of money they probably can’t afford on something that fits their lives less well, will remain for the birds. We don’t just need more charging points, we need more, many more really fast charging points. But even if we get them, if there’s not the electricity in the grid to power them all of them all day every day and do so properly, the infrastructure will stay as it is today: simply not fit for purpose.

The pity is that in every other regard, the i5 M60 is the kind of car in which doing a proper distance should be a natural, thoroughly enjoyable affair. But I know the next time I set out on one, what will be uppermost in my mind will not be whatever podcast or album I’m listening to, not how genuinely engaging this car is to drive, but whether sometime in the next three hours I’m going to have another Cherwell Valley experience. And that’s no way to enjoy your driving.