Visit to BMW Performance Driving Center in SC

Last week we left our ActiveE home in California and flew out to South Carolina for two days at the BMW Performance Driving Center. We drove a variety of new cars on the private track, including several built in the large BMW North America factory across the street from the performance driving center. Most of our time was spent in 1-series and 3-series cars, but we also spent time in M3s, M5s, 6-series, and an X5. In all cases we averaged well under 9 miles per gallon, which was quite a change from our normal all-electric driving in the ActiveE 1-series.

I spoke with a couple of the instructors about the ActiveE and it was a pretty foreign concept to them but they were legitimately interested. One of the instructors had a more than 60-mile commute into the BMW center and so was anxious about range, and all of the instructors were annoyed at the current price of fuel.

Despite the EV skepticism we observed, Greenville, SC actually has a growing EV charging infrastructure footprint. Apparently Enterprise offers some Nissan Leafs for rent in downtown so we may try to spend more time finding an EV to rent next time we visit the area, instead of just picking up one of the normal lackluster economy cars from the airport rental agencies.

The course itself was incredibly fun. 90% of the time was spent in the cars driving on our own and in radio contact with the instructors, but there were a few concise classroom lectures at the start of each day and after lunch to go over the upcoming exercises. We spent time sliding around on the skid pad, on slalom warmups, autocross courses, high speed braking and avoidance maneuvers, and an off-road X5 course. The video below includes a few highlights from our course.

We're definitely going back for the M-school next year. Let me know if you want to join us!

7 Months of Mostly Free EV Charging

It has been 7 months already and we've put over 5,850 miles on our electric car. During that time we've charged 196 times at 11 different charging stations, and never once paid for gas or waited for the tank to fill. One of the great things about electric vehicle charging stations, particularly those from ChargePoint is how they are networked and provide an online dashboard where you can view personal charging history and energy consumption. Our home charging station has a built in cellular uplink and is connected to an online account so all charges from home are automatically visible on the website. At public charging stations I scan an RFID card on my keyring to associate the charge with my account.

Using this website, I see that of those 5,850 miles, I used over 2,114 kWh of electricity. 27% of that electricity was consumed overnight by our home charging station in our garage, and the other 73% was provided free by the charging stations at my employer or the free charging stations at San Francisco city parking garages.

In our first month of owning the car, we didn't even have a home charger, and so we were charging exclusively for free, but not really putting that many miles on the car each day. Now that my wife is commuting further to work each day, we put over 50 miles a day and charge it up at home each night and at a parking garage in San Francisco each day while she is at work.

If we assume an electricity price of $0.12 per kWh, then it cost 2,114 * 27% * $0.12 = $68.49 in electricity to drive those 5,850 miles. Gas is approximately $5/gallon in Silicon Valley right now, so $68.49 would buy less than 14 gallons of gas (1 tank!). I'd have to get 418 miles per gallon to come out ahead with a gas car given how much of my driving is subsidized by free electric vehicle charging stations.

Parked for 31 days without any battery problems

Extended summer travel for work and pleasure had the unfortunate side effect of keeping us away from our ActiveE for 31 consecutive days. We left the car in our garage, unplugged with nearly a full charge. I was happy to find that the car started right up and still had more than 3/4ths of its charge when we finally returned to the Bay Area. I had left a USB phone charger plugged into one of the 9V sockets in the center console, but without a phone attached, so it was still drawing current for lighting a tiny LED on the charger while we were away. An indicator came on when I first started the car to note that there was excessive battery drain while I was parked, but otherwise everything was fine.

After the stories earlier this year about Tesla Roadster battery problems after extended periods of inactivity, I am glad to see that the ActiveE was fine after 31 days. If I have to leave the car for multiple weeks again in the future I'll make sure to take photos of the exact battery level before and after to measure the impact, but based on this initial experience it seems no worse than leaving an internal combustion engine inactive for several weeks.

Our Family Spaceship Featured on BMW website

It turns out that Mountain View BMW leased more of the ActiveEs than any other dealership in the country, and the cars are a pretty regular sight on the roads around here. I have been keeping in regular contact with engineers at BMW with feedback about the car and the Android/iOS mobile apps. Several weeks ago I was put in contact with some visiting BMW marketing people and, along with some of my coworkers who also drive ActiveEs, we did some interviews about our experiences with the cars. After a short interview where I talked about our experiences with the car, they edited the footage down to the 2-minute clip below which is posted on the BMW Activate the Future website. Also check out the videos from my colleagues, Zoomer, Nothing Like It, and Crusader.

ActiveEs at the Mountain View Tech Center

I work just up the road from the Mountain View BMW Technology Center, and have had the opportunity on several occasions to speak with engineers there about BMW's electric vehicle progress and general green initiatives. This morning some of my coworkers with ActiveEs and I drove over for breakfast with them to talk about our experiences with the cars. After breakfast we got a shot of five of our cars in front of the center here. We're parked a bit awkwardly because an officeworker at a nearby office building had parked his Nissan Leaf at the public ChargePoint station in front of BMW.

As with previous chats with BMW engineers about the ActiveE our discussion was overwhelmingly positive about the cars. We are all having a great time driving the cars; most of us got free chargers from ChargePoint America; the new solar incentive program sounds like a great deal; and we've had few major issues. After three months of driving these cars our main complaints revolved around relatively minor issues -- the missing Android App, limitations and quirks of the iDrive software, the inaccuracies of the Map data provider for the built-in navigation, and the car's inability to store the driver's preferences for charging times and Eco-Drive. All in all we came away impressed by the people and the office. It is a great experience to talk with people actually designing these cars, rather than only the sometimes less-than-impressive representatives at the dealerships.

Carpool Stickers Arrive!

Earlier this month our license plates and clean air vehicle decals arrived from the State of California.  These decals allow us to use the High Occupancy ("carpool") lanes across California with only a single occupant.  We got really spoiled by having these stickers on our Toyota Prius from 2006 to 2011, but eventually the rules were updated and regular hybrid cars no longer qualify for this incentive.  Now only plug-in hybrids (Chevy Volt, new Prius Plug-in Hybrid), fully electric vehicles (Tesla, Nissan Leaf, BMW ActiveE, etc.), and certain other alternate fuel vehicles qualify.  The utility of these stickers depends a lot on individual driving patterns, but there are definitely times in rush hour during our normal commute when the carpool lane is going 20 miles per hour faster than the other lanes, and in such cases it is a huge time saver.

Free Networked Home Charging Station

After 1500 miles without a home charger for our new ActiveE, the installation has at last been completed for our new networked CT-500 ChargePoint charger from ChargePoint America.  From a usability standpoint, the home chargers are even easier to use than the public stations -- there is nothing to scan, just remove the charger from the holster and plug it into the car.  The one button on the device can be used when you want to interrupt a charge in progress.

Notice the cellular antenna on the top right of the device.  One of the key benefits of these higher end charging stations is that they send status information back to ChargePoint so that the status can be viewed through a web portal or through the Charge Point mobile application.

The screenshot below of my ChargePoint dashboard shows my home charger listed in addition to the RFID card I keep on my keychain and use to charge at public charging stations (serial numbers whited out in the screenshot below).  I had to call the contractor to remind them to provision my new unit with ChargePoint and provide my ChargePoint account number to link the new home charger onto my existing account.

The dashboard and mobile app allow me to track charges and total electrical consumption for the car without having to have a separate electrical meter.

My main complaint so far is simply the loud buzzing noise when the unit charges.  This seems to have gotten a little quieter after the first charge, but is still noticeable.  Others have also commented about this in other EV forums.  Next week an inspector will come out to review the installation as part of the permit process (which was completely handled by the contractor), and I will ask about the noise at that time, but it is not any louder than a washing machine, so is not a big problem in any case.

Thank you American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Transportation Electrification Initiative administered by the Department of Energy!

First Month of Experience with ChargePoint

Update 4/6/2012: Thanks to a former colleague who now works at CoulombTech for pointing out a minor error in this post.  The Charge Point cards use RFID rather than barcodes.


We've had our ActiveE for over a month, but still don't have a home charger.  Over the past month we've put over 1300 miles on the car, and have charged exclusively at ChargePoint units at my office and at public charging stations.  To use a ChargePoint charger you first scan a barcode an RFID card to authenticate and then just plug in the standard J1772 connector to the car.  The fact that you scan in each time means that you can track your charging status and history precisely on the ChargePoint website or mobile application.


Some of the older ChargePoint chargers will cause a GFCI hard fault when you first start to charge with an ActiveE.  This is an issue that has been addressed in newer ChargePoint chargers and you can just retry if you ever experience this.  It was disconcerting to see this error on my first attempt to charge the car last month, but every ChargePoint charger includes an 800 number and the technician on the phone was able to monitor the station in real time and advised me to try again until we got it working.
I now find that this GFCI fault occurs in about one attempt out of three or four with an older ChargePoint unit, but it always succeeds on a second try.


Over the last month we've visited 6 different charging stations and consumed 447 kWh with the car.  ChargePoint claims that this is the equivalent of 635 kg of greenhouse gases saved, but that seems way too high so they must be comparing against a very inefficient internal combustion engine car to reach that figure.  This is presumably calculated using the emissions of an average gasoline-powered car and subtracting the emissions generated for the electricity to charge this electric car.

Using the EPA Clean Energy Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator I get a value of 308 kg of CO2 generated for the creation of the 447 kWh of electricity we used.  In my case this is a large overestimate because almost all of our charges have been from Solar powered electricity.  Our primary chargers at work are solar powered, as are the chargers at the Portola Valley Town Center.  The videos below show a bit of the charging infrastructure we've been fortunate enough to use.

Sound System on the ActiveE

Sound system on the ActiveE

The sound system in the ActiveE is similar to any other model year 2011 BMW, but in the interest of providing a complete picture I wanted to do a quick post about what I've experienced with it.  The BMW ActiveE lease has an unusual feature in that it is unlimited mileage.  BMW actually wants us to put as many miles as possible on these cars to help test them.  The unlimited mileage coupled with the fact that the charges are completely free almost everywhere in the Bay Area (I have never charged at home) means that we've been putting a lot of miles on the car going up and down the San Francisco Peninsula and have gotten to know the sound system pretty well on those drives.  Due to the limited nature of this trial, there were no premium sound upgrades available.


There are three main ways I currently listen to music in the car:

• Streaming Pandora Radio over bluetooth from my Android phone.  This works well, but I don't like having to fiddle with the phone to start a playlist or skip songs.
• Using MP3s I've stored in the car's built-in hard drive.  MP3s can be transferred from a connected USB drive in the glove-box, or ripped on demand from CDs that are put into the CD player.  I don't know how much space is on this hard drive, but I've copied over more than 100 MP3s so far into multiple playlists.  The MP3 importing software in the car seems to work pretty well in that I can put MP3s in different folders on a USB drive and they will be accessible through a menu hierarchy representing the directory structure once imported, and the importer is not confused by other non-music files on the USB device.
• The legacy formats such as SiriusXM Satellite Radio, CDs, radio, etc.

The options above work well, but I have a number of minor complaints / observations :

• The display doesn't handle Unicode characters for my MP3 collection.  I put in a couple of MP3s with titles and filenames in Mandarin but they do not display properly on the screen, as you can see from the screenshot below.
• Manually connecting a USB drive into the glove box to transfer MP3 files from my computer is cumbersome, and the car already has a data link anyway.  I'd love to be able to utilize the data link in the car to wirelessly send music from my home computer to the car, or at a minimum to transfer MP3s over Bluetooth.  Integration with Google Music or Amazon MP3 would be even better.
• Playlist management.  I haven't yet successfully copied over playlist files from my music collection to the car, nor have I found out how to setup an on demand playlist, or set a selection of songs to repeat (I have a 3 year old that occasionally insists on such repetition).
• In 2012, streaming internet music services such as Pandroa should be built-in, as they are far more useful than Satellite Radio.  The Toyota Entune software is supposed to offer Pandora in dash for the new Prius, so I would expect at least this much from the more expensive ActiveE.

Has anyone found out yet how large the hard drive is for MP3s?  Any other findings or comments about the sound capabilities of the ActiveE?

First Impressions

The reservation process for the ActiveE Field Trial was far from ideal, but we're happy to report that ultimately we were allocated one of the 700 U.S. cars and have been driving around our new all-electric 1-series BMW for the last month. I had previously test-driven the Tesla Roadster and Nissan Leaf, but those cars are at such opposite ends of the performance spectrum that it was hard to build up much of a pre-conceived notion of how an all-electric BMW would perform. After 800 miles, I must say I am impressed.  Electric cars are just so much more fun to drive — the smooth, quiet, fast acceleration is hard to compare to an internal combustion engine car. The ActiveE's acceleration and handling are much sportier than I expected.

We took delivery on February 29, 2012, and have been making heavy use of the free electric charging infrastructure in the Bay Area. There are hundreds of employer-provided electric vehicle charging stations within five miles of my house, and dozens of free public EV charging stations within 10 miles, so I haven't been too worried that we don't even have a home charger installed yet. According to my Recargo profile, we've made twenty visits to seven unique charging stations since we got the car, and have never once paid a dime for the electricity. Most of those visits have been just at my office where I charge up the car while working, but we've also made three trips to San Francisco, and found many very nice free public stations.

Given that there are only 700 of these cars in the U.S. it is surprising how many of them we have seen in the Bay Area. I started a mailing list for the 5 "electronauts" at my current employer that have already taken delivery, and I've parked right next to another ActiveE at a public charging station in Portola Valley.

On the way home from work tonight at a stoplight in Mountain View, CA, a car full of Tesla employees gave me a thumbs up and chatted me up about the car. When the green light came, the front passenger was trying to convince me of how amazing the Model S would be, but it should be noted that they drove off in a 3-series.