First few days and impressions of driving a BMW i3s

Firstly, I haven’t driven the i3 a lot – we have had a couple of 80 mile round trip journeys and several short ones. We have still to test it out more but this is what I’ve learned so far:

It is by far the easiest car I’ve ever driven. I’m used to driving an automatic – however, it’s even easier than that as you don’t have the gear noise – I do sometimes take my foot off our auto to get it down a gear for instance – there is none of that. It is hard to explain but it just makes driving seem effortless.

It is so quiet! I need to get used to being careful around pedestrians – it literally makes no noise at very low speeds and hardly any until your foot is down and even then, the interior noise is so much less than with an ICE car. I quietly beeped some kids on bikes earlier who couldn’t hear me.

My friends are so interested in it – lots know a little about electric cars but so far, only a couple have owned them (Leafs). They all want to have a look and go on a quick ride with us and most are very impressed – especially with the speed… which leads me on to…

I am surprised at how fast it is! The man who delivered it said it’s the fastest BMW 0-30. I still have to confirm this but you definitely get a g-force feeling when you put your foot down! I think i was naive to think that electric cars aren’t as powerful as conventional ones. I was SO wrong!

Charging is much easier than I thought – very easy to plug in overnight in our garage although the charge points themselves are confusing, actually plugging it in is much easier than putting petrol or diesel in. No way of getting anything muddled up (which I ‘may’ have done with petrol / diesel a couple of weeks ago!).

It’s very handy being able to heat up or cool down the car before getting in it – it is so hot today and I had the car all nice and cool for when I got in it. It makes quite a bit of a noise when you’re doing it so you can tell it’s working.

One of the strangest things to get used to is using my left hand to try to go from park into drive etc – I’m so used to either changing gear or at least in an automatic using my left hand to either set off or reverse it’s pretty strange using my right near the steering wheel instead.