“Oh, well, I think someone’s coming tonight,” he said. “Hey, I’ll just come tomorrow morning,” I told the dealer over the phone as I stared at red lines on my Google Maps app. “Okay, I’ll drive down there tonight.”īy late afternoon, I found myself still in my office, and I knew that, if I left at 4PM, I’d be in gridlock traffic all the way down the 5 to San Diego. I reached back out to the dealership the salesperson once again told me I could buy the car and use my five-day money back guarantee, should the battery test come back unsatisfactory. I searched car sales websites CarGurus, Autotrader, and Edmunds, and saw not a single i3 REx below $10,499. According to BMW’s website, the 133,640 mile i3 I had test driven was the least expensive one being sold by a BMW dealer anywhere in the country: Once back at work in LA, I continued shopping for i3s, but couldn’t find one as cheap as the one at that dealership near San Diego. I Bought The Car Because I’m A Cheap Bastard I need an indication of the wear and tear on that car’s battery before buying it. To me, that’s like hiding a car’s odometer reading. I responded that I wasn’t thrilled that I couldn’t even learn the state of a car’s battery before buying the car. Once back in LA, I received an email from the dealership asking if I’d been satisfied with my experience. I had a great drive and little shoreside walk with my friend and former Jalopnik intern Mack Hogan, since I’d already driven from my place in LA to just north of San Diego (where he lives), and had dinner prior to driving the couple of hours back to my abode: The battery on an EV is such a huge decider of the vehicle’s value that, to know nothing about the capacity was just too big of a liability. I needed to know what shape that battery was in before making a purchase, and the dealer wasn’t even selling the car to me at this point since it wanted to fix some things. Enjoying this post? Sign up for our newsletter! “We can maybe do some of these,” the dealer told me. I wanted to make sure the rattly exhaust was properly secured, that the battery was still healthy, that the gasoline-powered range extender worked (I hadn’t heard it, since it only cuts out when the battery is depleted), that the bumper was fixed, and that the underbody aero shield had been replaced (since it was missing). In fact, I gave the dealership a small list of requests prior to me signing the dotted line: I wanted to see what the car’s maximum calculated range would be with a full electron-tank. So I grabbed a motel nearby so that the dealer could top the battery up overnight and I could experience another test drive the following day. RELATED: We bought a high-mileage Mercedes with a rebuilt title. What shape was the battery in? The dealer had told me that the digital cluster had read 14.5 kWh, which translates to about 77 percent battery capacity, but I know that kWh number fluctuates and should be taken with a grain of salt. So after I arrived at the lot and test drove the partially-charged, cheapest clean-title BMW i3 range extender for sale in the U.S., I left uncertain. Here’s how that works:īut a real test involves discharging the battery all the way and then filling it up, and apparently that process takes a while it isn’t something that my dealer does before plopping a “for sale” sign onto a car. On the i3, dealers can get an approximate understanding of the battery’s health through the car’s digital gauge cluster. As I described in my article “ I Rented A BMW i3 For A Weekend And Now I’m Sitting In A Cheap Motel Two Hours From Home Contemplating Buying The Cheapest One I Could Find,” shopping for a used electric car has been an absolute nightmare, mainly because figuring out the health of the battery pack is far too difficult. Shopping For An EV Was RoughĮarly this month, I found myself in a predicament. But I did have one big stipulation: I needed to know what shape that high-voltage traction-battery was in. But I, a man smitten by the cute carbon-fiber city car, ignored logic and followed my heart into my back pocket, where I snatched $11,600 in cash (after taxes and fees), and handed it over to the dealer. Add that it’s electrified, fully loaded, a first-model year car, and being sold by a dealership that has no clue what shape the battery is in, and what you have is one of the worst ways a human could possibly gamble $10,500. Add the fact that it’s got 135,000 miles on it, and we’re already in “maybe don’t do that” territory. A nine year-old BMW is already questionable. On the face of it, it was a horrible move. I foolishly ignored a lot of smart people’s advice, and purchased the cheapest BMW i3 in the country.
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