My car: ‘24 i5 M60
My commute - SF Bay, 25-26mile each way, mostly freeway
I’ve spent 3 weeks living with the M60 and absolutely love this car - basically it’s the perfect blend of a well balanced, mild mannered executive sedan, but with the weird ability to unleash brutal acceleration if the moment takes you and has a chassis/ride to handle it all. I was initially wondering whether there would be times when I would prefer to drive the eDrive40, but this car handles those multiple personalities with ease. There are times when I want just a really comfortable ride and a car that can happily purr around - the i5 M60 does all of that. It has a reassuring heft - the cabin feels really well put together, no rattles or squeaks for me and the car handles poor quality pavement really well - far better than my beloved old 328i wagon with sport suspension. With the curb weight on this thing, it’s probably flattening out the bumps in the road at the same time….A lot of my driving is freeway, but the local back roads out here in the East Bay provide a great opportunity for the chassis to shine - it’s surprisingly chuckable. It’s equally at home slipping into sport mode and enjoying the twisties, as it is eating up the miles on the freeway. It’s definitely much bigger/heavier than my 3 series, but the chassis and suspension really do mask that to a remarkable degree.
In general, I commute in Personal driving mode - not especially heavy throttle, not super light on the way in, but on my way home when traffic is worse I’ve played with Efficient mode. It’s pretty interesting - the throttle response is definitely more blunted and the odd graphics in the HUD provide an interesting “training” view combined with the graphics on the dash to find a sweet spot in terms of throttle use, use of regenerative braking/anticipation of traffic. I’m a bit of a sucker for the gamification of these things. I appreciate that I’m no longer burning gas in stop/start traffic. It’d be nice to have a one touch way to engage sport mode - but maybe there is and I haven’t worked it out yet. I also almost instantly adopted B driving mode, one pedal driving is very intuitive when managing the ebb and flow of traffic on freeways.
Charging - not bad. This is my first EV, so I’ve been learning real time. We’re definitely well served in the Bay Area for chargers, so my experience is likely easier than others. I’ve a few EA chargers nearby, picking the right time to try to hit the fast charger is definitely a thing but is manageable. My office has a bank of ChargePoint level 2’s outside so the ability to use those during days I’m in the office and leave my car plugged in for several hours has been great. I’ve also created an EVgo account to unlock some additional fast chargers if I need them. I’m getting my home level 2 charger installed via Qmerit next week, so that should make life a lot easier, although dammit - I’m gonna use my free 2yr charging when I can.
Real-world range. I’m a bit of a geek so have been trying to track how the estimated range on the dash correlates with the actual battery life. My best guess right now is that the real world range I’m seeing is around the high 260 to 270ish mark, although the dash has shown me 300 after a charge to 100% a couple of times, I know that as the miles tick by that tends to recalibrate fairly regularly - I’ve also seen the range drop a chunk when I pre-condition, even though the battery charge % doesn’t change. Interesting algorithm I guess. I also sense that battery discharge is not fully linear - but I’m still trying to get a feel for that. Currently when I’m below 40% it seems like the charge drops off a little more quickly for the number of miles driven, but it’s still early days as I get accustomed to planning my recharging. Would it be nice to have >300miles range? Sure, but I can’t say it’s a concern for how I plan to use the car. It’d be fun to take a few road trips down the line and see if I can string together the chargers, but that’s really not my regular routine.
Anyway, all in, I couldn’t be happier with this car.