Regardless of how you feel about the exterior styling, interior design, infotainment software, or even driving dynamics of BMW’s latest Neue Klasse models, there’s no denying the new electric cars are extremely impressive when it comes to range, efficiency and charging. The in-demand Neue Klasse cars have consistently outperformed in real-world range tests, and last year BMW drove an iX3 from Debrecen, Hungary, to Munich, Germany, covering 626 miles on a single charge.
To show off just how road-trip-capable its Neue Klasse cars are, BMW took the new i3 on the Paneuropeana, a long-distance EV rally route devised by Rafael de Mestre, who has circumnavigated the globe in electric cars four times. The car covered 5,886.7 kilometers on the journey, or 3,658 miles rounded up — over 1,000 miles more than you’d drive when crossing the United States. It took 3 days, 2 hours and 41 minutes to complete the drive, and only 2 hours and 46 minutes was spent charging. Is that fast enough for you, yet?
A trip across Europe from north to south
The trip started at the North Cape in Norway, the northernmost point of continental Europe that you can get to by car (about 1,300 miles from the North Pole), and after crossing through eight countries ended in Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe in the Andalusian region of Spain. Along the way they encounted bad weather and rough roads, so it wasn’t a walk in the park. The focus of the drive isn’t outright speed, so the checkpoints and stages are organized like “regular road users travelling along country roads, motorways and through towns,” according to BMW.
Charging stops weren’t pre-determined, though, and BMW says that made for a great challenge: “optimising the route between checkpoints specifically to make the best use of the charging infrastructure, whilst also taking into account external factors such as the weather, traffic jams, etc.” The charging stations chosen were public ones, adding to the potential issues. In the video covering the trip, at one point the team got the car down to 0% with 0 kilometers of range left, and in another moment they arrive at a high-power charging station to find no chargers working.
Only one engineer was in the i3 at any given time, with the car being followed by an identical i3 and an iX3 for support. The i3 in question was a 50 xDrive model, which has a 108.7-kWh battery pack, a dual-motor powertrain with 463 horsepower, and an EPA-rated range of up to 468 miles in the States (567 miles on the European WLTP cycle).
The i3 set a new record
The point of the Paneuropeana is to see who can spend the least amount of time charging along the route, and BMW broke the record by more than seven hours. The i3 can charge at up to 400 kW, and on the trip BMW saw an average charging power of 275 kW, which ain’t bad. BMW says the i3’s average speed was just about 50 mph, and its energy consumption was damn impressive: 12.5 kWh per 100 km, which translates to almost 5 miles per kWh in U.S. figures. That’s better efficiency than the i3’s WLTP rating.
BMW hasn’t said how many times the i3 stopped to charge, or how long the average stop was, but does that really matter? A U.S.-spec i3 can gain 180 miles of range in just 10 minutes of charging, and it can go from 10% to 80% in 21 minutes. At steady highway speeds, the i3 should be able to take you almost 400 miles before needing to be juiced up again. That’s got to be good enough to assuage any range anxiety you’ve still got kicking around in your brain.
