“We’re real easy on the batteries,” Rick told me. “On the 2013 we can’t do a quick charge because it doesn’t have the capability. On the 2014 we have never done a fast charge, which is probably good for the battery. We never charge either of them when the charge is above 80 percent and virtually never let it get below 20, so I think that’s probably easy on the batteries. Basically, we haven’t had any trouble with the cars. The only money we’ve put into them is tires.”
John’s 2015 BMW i3
Photo: John
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John from New Jersey purchased his 2015 BMW i3 as a certified pre-owned car from his local BMW dealer when it was three years old and had 40,000 miles logged. It now has 80,000 miles on the same battery pack. John says that through all of this, the car’s maximum range has depleted from the original 72 miles to 62 miles, translating to a 14 percent decrease in capacity.
Prices of pre-owned electric vehicles (EVs) on AutoTrader show some models losing significant value in the first twelve months after registration. Although this might be bad news for those who bought new, it does give a handful of shrewd buyers the opportunity to buy EVs at much reduced prices. Unfortunately, even in the pre-owned market EVs are still priced well beyond the average motorist’s car budget
Image: Volvo
Just a few years ago, car subscriptions seemed as if they were going to be the next big thing in vehicle purchasing. Every automaker from Porsche to Ford and even car rental agencies were getting in on the game. Now though, most of them have all but quietly vanished.
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Subscriptions came about because of bad assumptions made by automakers. Mid-decade, the assumption was that by now (or at least going into the 2020s) we’d all be transitioning in a driverless car utopia and single-person car ownership would be a thing of the past. People would simply order up an autonomous vehicle from a free-roaming fleet to get to their destinations. Since no one would actually buy cars, people would subscribe to use them, essentially ending car ownership as we currently know it.
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1st Gear: BMW Has A Flurry Of Announcements This Morning
Which we will have more about in a bit but for now I will cover the topline one, which is that BMW says that it expects that half of its new car sales will be fully electric by 2030. The company has been getting serious about electric for a bit now. Also, say goodbye to internal combustion engine Minis.
The automaker plans for about half of total sales to be fully electric by the end of the decade, it said on Wednesday. The company also confirmed that its Mini brand will only sell battery-powered cars by the early 2030s.