300 miles trip with Rex, exerpience and points to make

[user 1096]

Is there any particular reason why UK owners have the option to turn the REX on or off, and US owners do not? Seems very strange to me.....

The Law is called CARB
So those of us who bought the Rex are penalized and left with an inferior arrangement, plus we are subsidizing people who buy BMW gas hogs.

Well, it's actually worse than that: CARB is the California Air Resources Board, a politically appointed board of Gov. Moonbeam friends--and it gets worse--they employ nothing but zealots as staffers. Actually, BMW won one major design trait over them in proposed regulation, but I'm sure they/we paid with some trade-off elsewhere because the Pureaucrats were not amused.

As for your comment about "subsidizing" gas guzzler BMW CAFE standards, that's not exactly true either. FWIW, this is my first BMW in 35 years that did NOT have a gas guzzler (several thousand $$) tax built into its sticker. So, I am looking at my federal tax credit as merely recouping some amount of those past-paid taxes. But I will note that my extant 545 sport 6-speed still AVERAGES 19.8 mpg around town and easily scores 23mpg on trips, INCLUDING the ethanol 10% efficiency penalty. Not bad for a big honking V8...and dramatically better than most US cars/vans chugging around on several fewer cylinders (albeit on Regular grade).

 

[ultraturtle]

...As for your comment about "subsidizing" gas guzzler BMW CAFE standards, that's not exactly true either...

What gets subsidized is probably a matter of semantics.

ZEV credits are big money - valued between $3,929 and $5,000 each. Tesla has sold and banked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ZEV credits, and would not be profitable without that revenue.

How they work is a bit complex. Basically, automobile manufacturers must have a certain number of ZEV credits based on the number of vehicles they sell annually in California. Without enough ZEV credits, they cannot sell in California at all, or must pay $5,000 per credit fine for the deficit. Manufacturers with excess credits can sell or bank them.

So a company wishing to sell cars in California is faced with a choice of gaining ZEV credits either by purchasing them (from a company like Tesla) or building lots of EVs that earn lots of credits. As the only range extended EV to comply with CARB's BEVx requirements, the i3 REx earns as many credits as the i3 BEV.

So, to state things more accurately, sales of the i3 make it possible to sell other BMWs in California (without BMW spending a fortune purchasing ZEV credits from other manufacturers).

Considering the staggering cost to build the world's first production carbon fiber automobile, to include billions of dollars in infrastructure investment dedicated to the process, I cannot understand how BMW could break even at the low price point of the i3 without those credits contributing to the bottom line. Considering the crazy high profit margins on high-end BMWs bringing in all of that cash, in a round about way, I consider them to be subsidizing the low consumer cost of the i3.