Four reasons this BMW is the perfect car for Singapore
THIS IS A prototype of the BMW 3 Series plug-in hybrid, a car that will only go on sale in 2016.
Apart from a petrol engine, it has a small electric motor fed by big batteries that you can charge in two hours if you have a 16-amp wallbox charger.
A normal household charger would take three hours to do the job.
It’s been disguised by swirly-patterned decals because BMW doesn’t want to show you what the finished version will look like yet, but engineers did let CarBuyer have a quick drive last week.
What we found after a few laps is that the petrol-electric BMW could well be the perfect car for Singapore. Here’s why.
It’s fast enough for our low speeds
You can drive it as a zero-emissions electric car and still hit 120km/h. If you’re feeling naughty, just step harder on the accelerator (it doesn’t seem right to call it a gas pedal) and a 2.0-litre turbo engine bursts into life to give it plenty of kick.
BMW won’t say how fast it is, but engineers let slip that the target level of performance is what the petrol-driven 328i offers, which is 0 to 100km/h in 6.1 seconds.
The plug-in prototype (which will likely be called “3 Series eDrive”) is only a little slower than that, but it still offers 245 horsepower to play with.
It’s cheaper than taking the bus, sort of
The average Singaporean driver does 50km a day. The 3 Series plug-in needs just one litre of petrol to cover that distance. Roughly speaking, that works out to a daily fuel bill of less than $2.
That’s less than it costs to take the bus to work and back.
In comparison, a normal car that achieves a relatively frugal 12.5km/L would cost nearly $3,000 a year to feed.
All that plug-in hybrid tech could be “free”
You might think that extra hardware like a motor and a large bank of lithium-ion batteries would cost a lot extra. And ordinarily you’d be right.
But while BMW is coy about the price, the company does say that the 3 Series eDrive should not cost much more than a 328i. Sadly, that costs $238,800 with COE here.
Yet the good part is that it emits just 50g/km of carbon dioxide per km, and that’s enough to qualify it for a $20,000 CEVS rebate, or $15,000 more than the 328i’s tax discount.
That difference could make the 3 Series eDrive equivalent in price to a 328i, or even cheaper if we’re lucky.
It’s tailored to city driving
The best way to use the 3 Series eDrive is to press the “eDrive” button and turn it into an electric car in the city, where start-stop traffic makes combustion engines woefully inefficient.
There’s always the turbo engine when you’re dicing with other cars on the PIE, but frequent, short drives are the best way to capitalise on the technology.
“If you buy a plug-in hybrid, you should actually drive a lot, like every day. You should do a lot of city driving,” says Ferdinand Wiesbeck, a development engineer who’s working on the car.
“The customer that drives to work a distance of up to 20 to 30km in a city or slow country roads, that’s actually the customer that will get the most value out of this car.”
Sounds like me and you and the other guy stuck at a red light with us.
And one reason it’s all wrong for Singapore…
Charging the car every day, just like you do with a smartphone, is crucial to getting the most from it.
“The consumption, in comparison to gasoline cars, depends heavily on how your charging behaviour is. If you never charge, it’s gonna be lower than a 328i because we can’t use the battery,” says Wiesbeck. “If you charge, you can get the consumption way down.”
And right now there just isn’t the infrastructure for it here.
There are just 16 Greenlots charging locations compatible with BMWs in Singapore today, with eight more planned by year’s end. By the end of 2015 there should be at least 35 locations, but even that might not be enough to tempt consumers into giving plug-in hybrid drive a try.
BMW is going into electrification in a big way, so the technology is definitely not headed for a dead end. It just has obstacles to clear here.
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