Why I just bought a Prius Prime, keeping BMW i3-REx

[bwilson4web]

Hi,

My fail-over vehicle has been a 2010 Prius but I've had to use it three times, June for 10 days, September for 2 days, and December 19 days, due to repairs on our 2014 BMW i3-REx. Had another BMW i3-BEV or REX been the loaner car, I probably would not have cared. But the BMW loaners, ordinary gas cars, were not good and I had to revert to the 2010 (Gen-3) Prius. Worse, the BMW i3-REx had spoiled me for long distance driving using dynamic cruise control which our 2010 Prius does not have.

I have the BMW warranty to January 2019 but repair times, parts delays, and the in traffic failure of the motor mount bolt, has made me uneasy about the long-term prospects. Add to that the potential cost of tires from a single source, these bother me as in 2019 I'll be fully retired.

Had the plug-in Prius Prime been available in May 2016 for the price I just paid ($28.4k - $4.5k Federal credit,) I would have gotten the plug-in Prius Prime instead of the BMW i3-REx ($29.9k end-of-lease.) Comparing the specs:

• BMW wins: 72-80 miles EV vs 22-25 miles
• Prius Prime wins: +52 MPG vs 40 MPG and losing ~20% SOC at 75 mph
• Prius Prime wins: +600 miles range vs 150 miles
• Equals: dynamic cruise control and collision avoidance
• Prius Prime wins: 15" common tires vs 19" one vendor
• BMW wins: city handling turn radius and acceleration vs larger, lethargic Prius Prime
• Prius Prime wins: midsize car vs subcompact

I still have the parts to double the BMW i3-REx gas range from ~80 mi to ~160 mi but I've lost interest in risking the BMW warranty until January 2019. I would rather deal with the plug-in Prius Prime limits than the risks of the BMW i3-REx.

Bob Wilson

 

[alohart]

I understand completely. I, too, am quite concerned about the poor reliability and expensive repair costs of the i3 after its warranty expires (we own our i3 Although the only repairs our 2014 BEV has had are the replacements of the defective KLE (I was aware of this when I bought our i3) and the weak motor mount bolt, we have driven it only 4,200 miles, and there seem to be several other fairly common, expensive problems excluding the REx problems that don't affect our BEV. As your recent motor mount problem illustrates, replacement of just the motor mount bolt is apparently insufficient to correct the poor motor mount design, yet BMW has not indicated that it will do the right thing which is to replace all the weak motor mount components with improved parts as they did with yours (I suspect that newer i3's have these improved parts already). BMW wasn't proactive at all with the motor mount bolt replacement instead waiting for a scheduled maintenance service visit to replace this bolt even though breakage would strand the driver and could break expensive components. That's poor customer service!

So when its warranty expires in November, 2018, I will have a tough decision to make: keep our i3 and risk expensive repair costs or sell our i3 and take a huge financial loss. Selling our i3 would definitely be expensive, so I suppose keeping our i3 in hopes that it will be reliable would make more sense (until the first expensive repair cost). I have never owned an expensive, unreliable vehicle and don't enjoy the experience!

 

[bwilson4web]

Thanks Art, I'm not here to post any trollish nonsense but rather to share facts and data that I can personally verify.

Thursday I picked up the 2017 Prius Prime Plus and Friday drove it 1,200 miles home to Alabama in about 22 hours. This included over an hour at my brother Dave's house on the way. But we have a few Volt advocates posting around PriusChat and our usual response is to whack them down with a clue-by-four which is where this note came from.

Now I'm a rare owner of both a 2014 BMW i3-REx (near top trim) and a 2017 Prius Prime Plus (bottom trim.) But Car and Driver claims the Volt is a better car over the Prius Prime. So I took the EPA metrics and compared our 2014 BMW i3-REx, 2017 Prius Prime, and the EPA specs for a 2017 Volt:

• Treated MPGe and MPG as equivalent.
• Assumed all three cars are pre-charged before running to empty using the EPA test profile.

A visiting Volt advocate asserted the Volt EV range gave better performance than the Prius Prime in a narrow range, 30-100 miles, forgetting there already were also 2014 model BMW i3-REx out there that led to the chart.

BMW i3-REx, cross country performance suffers from both a small tank and low efficiency. I can fix the tank problem. Improving engine efficiency is a little more tricky. In contrast, the Prius Prime is a cross-country champ. So Friday, I solo drove the Prius Prime home in 20 hours which included about a 2 hour visit with my brother Dave:

I topped off the tank after leaving Dave's home and filled it up again near Roanoke VA. For cross country travel, the dynamic cruise control, lane keeping, and collision avoidance made the solo-drive, feasible ... more so than our 52 MPG 2010 Prius sold two weeks ago.

Sad to say, I did not find dynamic cruise control on the Volt I saw a week ago at the local Chevy dealer. The sales manager said it could be $pecial ordered. That Volt would not have been an improvement over our old Prius.

Had the Prius Prime been available in May 2016, I probably would not have bought the BMW i3-REx. Had the BMW i3-REx not broken the motor mount bolt in traffic in December 2016, I probably would not have bought the Prius Prime. When I get a 2" receiver on the back of our Prius Prime, the BMW i3-REx will probably go on eBay . . . and if 'wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'

Bob Wilson