My 143,000 mile 2014 BMW i3 has a terrible achilles heel that makes it much, much more expensive to drive than it needs to be. And yet, I just ran the numbers and found it to be the case still significantly cheaper to drive than a gas car, especially here in California. Let’s take a look at these calculations and you’ll see why this is such an insanely good deal despite its rather significant downside.
My i3 was very reliable. In 12 months and 10,000 miles of driving, I replaced the 12 volt battery and did a preventive oil change on the differential. That’s it. And other i3 owners say that’s what I can expect for years to come; it’s a ridiculously reliable machine. In California, where gas is $5 a gallon, you’d think I’d save a bunch of money. After all, all I really have to do is pay my electricity bill and that’s it. No regular shifts, no whining gas pumps, no spare parts for an internal combustion engine — I just turn it on every night and drive.
But the reality is not that simple and my i3 will probably cost more to drive than I thought.
The tire problem
BMW i3s absolutely I chew through tires, and although this is the case with many EVs, the i3 is among the worst culprits. Go to the BMW i3 forums and you’ll find pages and pages of talk about the massive tire wear. Some people don’t even get 20,000 miles out of their kit:
Based on what I’m reading, if I’m lucky, I can get two years out of a set of tires before I need to spend $1000 on a new set of tires, as — and this only applies to the i3 — the tire options are severely limited because of this , that they are of special (weak) size:
The tires on a typical gas car will last twice as long, so while over a decade I’ve been buying five sets of tires for a total of $5,219.80, a gas car owner would only need to buy 2.5 sets and probably less low price due to more availability. One can get a decent set of tires on a typical gas car for $700 installed; multiply that by 2.5 and you get $1,750 in tires to drive over a decade — that’s $3,469.80 saved over driving a gas car over my i3!
But let’s look at fuel costs.
Fuel consumption: where the i3 makes up a lot of ground
First of all: Electricity is not free. I usually spend about 30 cents per kWh, taking into account both the energy rates in my apartment and those at the charging stations. My i3 usually gets about four miles per kWh, which means I spend 30 cents to go four miles, or 7.5 cents per mile. A typical gas car the size of my i3 (like a Mini Cooper) can easily get 32 miles per gallon, which means that each mile costs $5 (which is roughly the cost of a gallon here in California) divided by 32 = about 15.6 cent, or 8.1 cents per mile more expensive than my i3. Let’s say the average annual miles driven is 12,500 (that’s the US average) and I save $1,012.50 a year on fuel! That’s $10,125 over a decade.
Not to mention I’m saving $25 every 3 months because I don’t have to do an oil change (I rarely use the range extender on my i3 so we can ignore that for now) and I’m saving a lot by not having to bother with serpentine belts or oxygen sensors or even brakes (as my i3 uses regenerative braking so pad wear is minimal).
Let’s say we spend $100 every 50,000 miles (four years of typical driving) on an insanely cheap DIY brake, which means over 10 years you’re spending about $250 on it. As for oil changes, if you do one every 4,000 miles like me, that’s about three a year, or $75 a year, or $750 a decade.
So $750 for an oil change, $250 for brake work, and $10,125 extra in fueling per year, and you end up with $11,125 more to run a typical gas car. Even after you deduct the extra $3,469.80 I pay for tires above that range, we’re still at $7,655.20 saved driving my i3 instead of an equivalent gas car for a decade.
The price of entry
But what about the price of admission? Well, that used to be where gas cars gained ground, but that’s not the case anymore. New EVs are approaching price parity with gasoline cars, and used EVs are downright cheap These days. You can buy a 2020 Tesla Model 3 for around $25,000. My 2014 BMW i3 was $10,500 and if I had gotten a federal rebate it would have been closer to $7,000. Try finding a 10-year-old luxury car with adaptive cruise control, self-parking, and a Harman Kardon sound system for $7,000. Heck, even finding one for the full $10,500 I paid would be difficult.
My girlfriend and I just drove the Lexus RZ in wine country last weekend. The thing starts at over $56,000 new, but I find examples with only 1,000 miles on the odometer going for under $40,000. Polestars are getting cheaper, VW ID.4s are getting cheaper and on and on. If you can find a good deal on a reliable EV, and especially if you can take advantage of a federal EV rebate, you can save some money, assuming gas isn’t too cheap where you live.
Anyway, just thought I’d share these numbers since I was sure the tire situation on my i3 would put me in a hole. But really, considering how expensive gas is, I guess I can deal with it chewing up tires at twice the speed of a gas car.
Main photo of above image: BMW
