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N O R T H E AST V I C TO R I A
JUNE 8 - 14 | 2018
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SPARKY: Lower ride height, wider tyres and black details around the wheel arches give the BMW i3s a tougher look.
BMW’s
sporty electric city car THE good folks at BMW just couldn’t help themselves. Their i3 electric city car is clearly their vision of the future … but BMW has a long history of sporting motoring. So the i3 engineers and stylists couldn’t resist designing a sports version, tagged, without a great deal of imagination, the i3s. We reckon there’s a strong chance that the engineers from the BMW i8 supercar section of the i Division had a finger in the pie as well. And we wonder if the revheads from M Division called in to say g’day from time to time? We’ve just spent an enjoyable week in a BMW i3s and found it even more fun to drive than the standard i3 94ah we had a few months back.
By EWAN KENNEDY STYLING Cute and very different inside and out, BMW i3 is basically a large volume rectangular box that’s been rounded off at the edges and corners to add some style. The result is cabin spaciousness you don’t get in conventional cars of this size. The i3s front spoiler is wider and bolder in its shape than the standard i3. The rear track is widened by 40mm because it has wheel arch surrounds added to cover the extra width of the wheels. The black colour of these surrounds is continued onto the door sills, and the 20-inch alloy wheels are in black. Sporty? Well sort of, but we
DRIVING Performance is terrific, with the instant off-the-line reaction we love in all electric cars. There’s near silence from the rear mounted electric motor and the little petrol charging engine is barely audible when it spins away at its fixed speed. Most of our driving was done in Comfort mode rather than in one of the Eco modes. That’s because this is a sporty model and surely that’s the way the typical owner would drive one. Around town a range of 190 to 225 kilometres was possible in Comfort mode. Which is more than enough for normal suburban daily use.
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COME AND TEST DRIVE THE ALL-NEW 2018 MAZDA BT-50 TODAY!
certainly liked the appearance. POWERTRAIN Power and torque from the electric motor have both been increased. Power to 135 kW (it was 125 kW), torque to 270 Nm (250 Nm). These are the sort of numbers you would expect from a six-cylinder petrol engine of about 3.0 litres, so there’s plenty of grunt in this little Bimmer. There’s the option of a range extender engine, a small twin-cylinder petrol unit. It never powers the i3s directly but only maintains the battery charge at its current level, it doesn’t increase the amount of energy in the batteries, simply adds to the overall range of the vehicle. It was fitted to our road test car.
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