Our electric baby sneaker on wheels
My first rodeo with a BMW i3 REx
I’ve been car-less for 12 years.
It’s been freedom and an un-freedom, as much as it was great to not pay for gas or look for parking when I lived in Brooklyn, the wish for having wheels again began to slowly creep back into my life. I missed having the ability to just get away from the city on a weekend to wherever, and not rely on public transit to do it.
Long story short– COVID happened, and my husband and I are back in Ohio where I grew up. We need a car. Yay mobility! Boo insurance premiums.
This weekend we had the pleasure of test driving our first electric car, the BMW i3 range extender. And oh man was it fun! That thing certainly can boogie. It had great acceleration, a nice wide-open front view from the low dashboard in the front (there’s no motor up there!), and I could not stop commenting that “it looks like a little Nike sneaker!”. It’s a pretty cute car.
The BMW i3 is a stepping-stone car — a product bridging the gap between yesteryear and the brave new world of tomorrow.
– Tim Pollard, Editorial director of CAR’s digital publishing arm
My husband laughed, “the dashboard feels like a conference room”. There are no pillars when you open the doors, it feels very contemporary and minimalist. The wood paneling on the dash is real! Overall, it feels like a modernist’s dream car.
This is not an ad for EVs. I want to comment on something that happens when you don’t own a car, but drive them often enough– there’s a bit of a UI “whiplash” that happens every time you drive a different car. Every rental or borrowed car has the same features, but different ways of learning to use them. Like, “Where in this menu can I find the Bluetooth? Where’s the steering adjustment? Which side is the gas tank on?”
The style, setup, and functionality differ from one brand to the other, so it's always a little overwhelming finding your bearings when you first get in.
From a usability perspective…
- Visibility and Feedback. It's still so cool and wacky how quiet electric vehicles are. I think, “It's a glorified golf cart!” Even driving hybrids in the past, I’m like “Am I sure it’s on?!” Upon startup, there’s a little audible jingle and the dashboard lights up, but it takes some getting used to not hearing an engine roar. Someday soon, the opposite will be the norm!
- Consistency & Standards. What threw me for a loop initially was the gear shift. I was expecting to find it in between the driver's and passengers' seat, where it is usually standard for cars. In trucks sometimes it’s behind the steering wheel, and I wasn’t expecting it to be there in the i3. Additionally, it's kind of a knob that you “slide” up and down to change gears, which took some getting used to. At first, I think I tried to shift it up (like in a truck) and then I tried turning it. It took a few tries to get used to the up or down motion for shifting. It also took playing around a few times with the control for the moonroof to understand how it works. Sadly, it doesn’t retract all the way back! Bummer.
- Affordances. I quickly figured out (from test driving a different car the weekend before) that the knob in the middle of the driver's and passengers' seats was for controlling the settings on the LCD dash screen. But I also assumed that it was the knob for controlling the sound volume of the speakers. Nope! Took some searching around (and asking our salesman who rode with us) to find it, next to the driver's side of the dash. It’s a totally separate button, which I thought was strange at first. I guess I assumed since the big knob in the middle turns like a volume dial that it must control the volume as well somehow.
- Minimizing Errors. My husband drove first, and when it was my turn, I got in the driver's seat and turned the handle to “D” for drive. Nothing happened. “Press the brake” (which I was!), “Put it in park. Press the brake, then try drive?” We went through a few rounds of this with our salesperson before we found the right combo (I think I had to press the brake before turning the car on? Idk, can’t remember). The point is, there wasn’t much audibly or visually to correct me as to what I was doing wrong when starting it up for the first time.
In the end, we had fun driving this zippy little EV around the block a few times, with our salesman-navigator in the backseat. It might be a good fit for our needs, although we’d need to put some forethought into taking it on longer journeys (though the range extender greatly eases that anxiety). If we do, I’ll look forward to getting to know it better by reading the manual with a warm beverage (and driving it around too).
