i3

Over the weekend rumors started floating around on social media about a possible stop-sale and recall on all the BMW i3’s sold in the United States of America. This morning BMW came out with an official statement, confirming that, during recent testing by the National Highway Safety Administration, it was discovered that the BMW i3 (BEV and REx) marginally exceeded one particularly edge case of the many Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard criteria with respect to frontal impact performance.
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Earlier this year, Germany announced its first electric vehicle incentive program to spur adoption of green vehicles in the country. Financed by both the state and the local auto industry, the program offers a €4,000 discount at the purchase of an all-electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybrid.

The program is capped to electric vehicles with a starting price of less than €60,000, which prompt Tesla to respond and claim that it was purposely left out by the auto industry since its vehicles start at over €60,000. While the program is not helping Tesla, it is certainly helping BMW as reports are coming out claiming that sales of the BMW i3 are somewhat unsurprisingly significantly rising in Germany since the launch of the program earlier this month.
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BMW has been talking about introducing a higher capacity battery pack for a while now. At first, we were talking about a roughly 25% improvement on the EPA-rated range of 81 miles, which would have increased the range to about 100 miles.

Later, the increase was then said to be closer to about a 50% increase based on comments by BMW AG board member Ian Robertson. It looks like BMW is now sticking to that number and even used it to advertise the next generation, which should be made available this summer.
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