Technology Thoughts

Roughly three months into driving 225xe, it seems about right time come back to revisit the initial impressions and see how the car fares in long-term usage. In this post, I want to focus on the 225xe driving modes of which the car offers aplenty. First, there are the three traditional BMW Driving Experience modes: COMFORT, SPORT, and ECO PRO, which come fitted on non-hybrid powertrains as well. Then there are the eDrive modes: AUTO eDrive, MAX eDrive, and SAVE BATTERY. To complicate this even further, moving the gear stick to the left at any time switches the automatic gearbox to the sports mode, so there are two gearbox modes: Drive and Sport/Manual which allows sequential gear shifts. So in theory, there are 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 combinations, in practice, some of the combinations are mutually exclusive, so it is not so extreme as it seems. What is apparent though is that BMW keeps adding new options while maintaining the legacy options as well without thinking about consolidation. This...

Putting my money where my mouth is, I took on the adventure of buying a plug-in hybrid. A few years back, I used to drive a car only for weekend getaways, so an SUV seemed to be a logical choice. At only fifteen thousand kilometers driven annually, the fuel economy was not a significant issue, the driving experience was the main thing. During the past few years with family and small kids, the car usage became more spread out throughout the week. With that said, I noticed we maintain two very distinct driving patterns: many short trips around Prague during the week to get kids to school and sports and then longer trips, roughly 100 miles each direction, during the weekends. With short distances and many cold starts due to the city driving on the workdays, the already poor fuel economy of an SUV deteriorated further. I realized when our car was up for renewal that it was almost as if we needed two different vehicles for two different use cases - an electric vehicle for city driving a...