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      07-14-2019, 09:03 AM   #33
Efthreeoh
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Drives: The E90 + Z4 Coupe & Z3 R'ster
Join Date: May 2012
Location: Virginia

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I don't think BMW's use of carbon fiber was all that innovative regarding weight vs. range performance. When BMW increased the i3's battery size to increase it's range to near 120 miles I did some rough calculations on sizing up the i3's weight to have it's range match the Chevy Bolt's 238 miles. Mostly just a battery weight increase based on KW increase, the i3 came out only 200 pounds less than the Bolt. My calculations did not include any body-in-white chassis weight increase (strengthening for crash performance) nor component hardware increases (like larger brakes) to accommodate the increase in battery weight. And even then the i3 had about a 180 - 200 mile max range assuming no change in battery technology. So the use of carbon fiber in the body shell was not worth additional manufacturing cost and complexity IMO.

BMW is way late to the game of EV, other manufacturers are at least 15 years a head of BMW despite what BMW's marketing hype says. While BMW is highly profitable, it is still a comparatively small manufacturer (13th IIRC) in the industry and it is financially burdensome to develop an entire new technology and bring it to the market, let alone catching up to the industry leaders being a decade or so behind in development to them.

Lastly, this apparent move of the market to EV and autonomous driving will all but kill any innovation anyway in the long term and companies that build the ultimate driving machine will have no place in it. I think real autonomous driving is 40 years away, there are too many technical, social, regulatory and cost hurdles in the way.
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A manual transmission can be set to "comfort", "sport", and "track" modes simply by the technique and speed at which you shift it; it doesn't need "modes", modes are for manumatics that try to behave like a real 3-pedal manual transmission. If you can money-shift it, it's a manual transmission. "Yeah, but NO ONE puts an automatic trans shift knob on a manual transmission."

Last edited by Efthreeoh; 07-14-2019 at 09:12 AM..
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