E39s are my favorite too but if you know many BMW guys, you have to admit your experience was the exception.

Call it whatever makes you happy.

300,000km and it wasn’t on its 3rd radiator and 3rd set of front bushings? No valve cover leaks, failed camshaft sensors, front wheel bearings, aux fan failure, dead pixels in the display, window actuator failure, rotting window gaskets (I could go on)?

I’m sure that Civic is a lovely car.

The next drive state occurs when the car is still in EV mode, but reaches around 70 mph. At that point the 111 kw electric motor begins to spins too rapidly and loses efficiency, around 6500 rpm. To improve efficiency the system kicks in the smaller 55 kw electric motor to operate in parallel. GM thought a lot about…

Read it again. At 70mph, the SECOND ELECTRIC MOTOR engages, lowering the RPM of the primary for better efficiency.

How a car functions is about 100X more important to me than perceived interior quality but yes, a less expensive car with a SIXTY KILOWATT-HOUR battery is going to have less budget for fancy materials than one with a 22kwh battery.

How many consumers know WTF you’re talking about?

Tesla already sells an adapter for CHAdeMO chargers and the car comes with a J1772 adapter. I’m sure they could do CCS if the demand existed.

You lost me somewhere between “tons of issues” and “then German cars”. :)

Better build quality than the not-yet-delivered Bolt? :) I had an ‘11 Volt and I know that i3 REX owners would kill for the reliability of that car. Of course, I was forced to suffer without eucalyptus trim.

It’s going to cost $5k less than an i3 and have still have 2X more range than the rumored updated i3.

To reply to myself: the Bolt gearbox architecture has some similarities to the SparkEV but it’s not the same. Notably, they went for a more “traditional” (in the 5 year old EV market...) higher revving, lower torque motor.

The 1st gen Volt would go 101 on electric only. I think the 2nd gen is limited to high 90s.

The Bolt supports 50kw “supercharging” to the SAE CCS standard. You can already get from Maine to Miami on the East coast and from Seattle to Tijuana on the West using only DC fast charging. Not me though. I’m flying. :)

Agreed. Even the compliance SparkEV has a very slick, compact drivetrain. I assume its architecture ended up in the Bolt.

80MPGe seems really optimistic. The BMW xDrive40e gets 56 combined MPGe. The Porsche Cayenne plug-in, 47. Both only go 14 miles EV max. The Audi A3 e-tron is 83 combined and is much, much smaller.

Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent to the excellent write-up provided for the M3. Just a few posts from a guy who had assembled the parts and claimed it was a straightforward conversion that he had done a few times. He didn’t provide any details about the exact parts or process.

Well said. Sales are certainly pretty low but there’s a whole group of people who bought/leased EVs for whatever their pet reason who realized “hey, these things are actually BETTER to drive”.

It’s doable with the 360s at least but it’s a pretty expensive operation. IIRC, someone was selling the parts kit on ferrarichat for $5500. The 430s are much more difficult because the electronic differential is apparently tied in somehow.