I have never been a fan of
I have never been a fan of the i3 because of it's weird styling. It was as awkward looking as the impressive i8 was beautiful. But I will give credit to BMW for engineering the heck out of the car, with a carbon fiber frame and the door pillar built into the suicide rear doors for easy rear access. But like almost every one of the early BEV designs, their relatively short (originally 72mi+/later 114mi) EV only range limits usability compared to similarly priced newer BEVs with double the range. Plus the range extender was designed to meet older compliance restrictions, and so it only produces 34HP and you cannot just drive the car on the gas engine alone like you can in the Volt, ELR, Prius, and Clarity PHEVs. In fact BMW has several lawsuits from owners who found it unsafe when their i3 went into limp mode without warning on the freeway, immediately dropping down to 45MPH. And even though (like VW's EV Golf and Nissan Leaf) the EV range went up from early models, it was still relatively low. And with the range extender an i3 was approaching $50K and together with the battery it only managed 200 miles, as opposed to the similarly priced Tesla Model 3 Long Range which gets around 310 EV miles. Ultimately most automakers are abandoning small EV cars for more profitable EV CUVs and luxury models, so it makes sense that BMW would simply transfer their EV technology to their larger line of CUVs and SUVs. As much as I want to see more fun EV sportscars, this move makes good business sense considering today's bigger vehicle market climate. I think that time will view the BMW i3 as an interesting (early) BEV engineering exercise, that set the stage for better future BEVs.