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Our Cars: Electric vs hybrid BMW, the verdict
1 year ago
Detail differences apart, the i5 and 5 Series are identical
I’d say also I’d have never done this had I not already felt pretty well disposed towards this platform in the first place: perhaps we should run long termers we suspect we’re not going to like, but I don’t particularly want to live day in, day out with something I know is going to annoy me and for you there seems little value in the narrative once it’s become clear it’s not a product I’d likely be recommending to anyone. Besides, the i5 was going to be my first EV and if I was going to make that step, I wanted it to be a comfortable one.
And so it proved. Seen in isolation, the i5 M60 Touring is a fine thing. It has nearly 600bhp, looks as good as a current BMW can look, has just about the best ride of any BMW I’ve driven in the last decade and when you need to squirt past the car in front, it has so much torque the process seems more like teleportation than conventional overtaking. It was soothing, silent and sumptuously equipped. It induced in me not the slightest desire to drive it fast, so the fact it weighs 2350kg (still substantially less than an M5 wearing the same clothes) was of no inconvenience to me. It’s even a decent-enough (though far from great) estate car.
"Even if you have a really good experience, you don’t know that’s going to happen when you leave home, so you have always to anticipate the possibility of a really bad experience with broken chargers, slow chargers or queues at the station, into every long journey"
But it has two serious problems, related, but one which is BMW’s fault, the other anything but. First – and this is probably symptomatic of having to sit on a compromised platform – its range is nothing like good enough. Claims of ‘up to’ 310 miles actually mean around 220 miles in cold weather, so you’ll want to stop after 180 miles or so because who’d dare run an EV down to zero? And then there’s the public charging process, about which I’ve fulminated in the past so won’t dwell upon here. The only point I will reiterate is that even if you have a really good experience, you don’t know that’s going to happen when you leave home, so you have always to anticipate the possibility of a really bad experience with broken chargers, slow chargers or queues at the station, into every long journey. So whether you end up waiting far longer than you’d like as you charge, or sat outside your destination because you’ve arrived so early is really neither here nor there: you’re still waiting. At best it is simply inefficient, at worst bloody frustrating.
Even so, chopping it in for the £40k cheaper 530e with barely half the power did seem likely to feel like a step down from Business to Premium Economy. But it’s not how it turned out. I am not an equipment junkie – quite the reverse in fact: so long as a car has CarPlay, decent seat heaters, and passive cruise control I’m fairly happy. Earlier this year I drove a Dacia Duster so equipped from Wales to Belgium and back over a 36-hour period and didn’t mind at all.
“I would say at least 80 per cent of the journeys I took were on electrical power alone because the vast majority were within its 63-mile EV range. I’d have eked the electrons out further still if the car had been smarter about deciding when to use battery power and when to fire up the engine. Unless you intervene, it’ll essentially just drain the battery even when it makes no sense to do so, like when you’re on the motorway”
True the 530e didn’t ride quite as beautifully as the i5 but by more normal standards it was better than decent: it was still really good. But its performance was limited by comparison and on more than one occasion I found myself thinking about overtaking something before remembering that despite looking just like the i5, I had but a fraction of its firepower under my right foot.
But the prize was that not only was there no range anxiety, no queues to charge, no waits while it charged and a range fully double that of the i5, for the vast majority of the time it was here, I was still driving an EV. I filled the tank three times in over 4000 miles. I would say at least 80 per cent of the journeys I took were on electrical power alone because the vast majority were within its 63-mile EV range. I’d have eked the electrons out further still if the car had been smarter about deciding when to use battery power and when to fire up the engine. Unless you intervene, it’ll essentially just drain the battery even when it makes no sense to do so, like when you’re on the motorway. I spent so much time driving it as an EV, it was a genuine surprise when the not very tuneful 2-litre four-cylinder motor occasionally chimed in.
I guess I should also cover some aspects of depreciation even though the idea of someone walking into a BMW showroom and parting with £100k before extras for an i5 M60 Touring seems preposterous to me. And it does so because you can find one-year-old cars from main dealers, with fewer than 5000 miles on the clock, that you can buy for two thirds of that amount even if you don’t haggle, which you absolutely should. And when you consider the stack of options many of these cars carry, they’re actually little or no better than half price. After one year. And while the 530e will still lose a not dissimilar proportion of its value in the first year, when its list price is just under £62,000 rather than £100,000, there’s just a lot less distance to fall and a lot less money to be lost.
So I find myself in the slightly strange situation of not being able to recommend the car I preferred, which was the i5 by a small, but significant margin. And until it gets a better battery and the country an upgraded, more reliable, extensive and affordable charging network, I can’t really see how that’s going to change. The 530e just works better, more of the time and for a beast of burden like this, is that not the most important consideration of all?
