In other news, what's going on with BMW?

I've been a BMW fan since the mid-2000s, and while I've put up with a lot of drift over the years, I simply cannot understand the brand's EV strategy. Plus: new cli-fi, hooray!

So, look, you know I’m a car girl. And I know that EVs aren’t the be-all, end-all of climate solutions (I’m pretty proud of myself for using my caulk gun and some putty to seal up cracks in my downstairs sliding glass door to try to keep the heat in and the cold out, and vice versa!). But they’re an easy, sexy entry point to a sustainable lifestyle and frankly, they’re the most interesting thing going on in car culture right now.

If you like driving and you get your hot little tootsies on that EV acceleration and the whisper-quiet cruising through the streets, you’re sold. And it’s hard to overstate how awesome it is to have your house be your gas station. When you spend a weekend driving around, including to and from Levi’s Stadium for the 49ers game, you just roll into the driveway at 19% and plug the car in and go to bed. You wake up the next morning with a full tank. No stress-stopping for gas in the rain on the way to school—you’re charged and so is your phone and you’re ready to rock. I love EV life and I love cars and as it happens, I also love BMWs, which is why I don’t understand why my favorite car brand feels like it’s slow-walking the electric transition.

None of the cars in this picture is an EV. Like, would that have killed you?

It’s not that BMW isn’t making EVs. They have two, and they’re both extremely well-reviewed and seem like really good cars (although the iX, the SUV, is pretty universally considered ugly as sin).

It’s more that they sort of seem like they can’t be bothered to market or sell either of these EVs. Friends of mine who are shopping for EVs that aren’t T*sla are looking at the Hyundai Ioniq5, the Kia EV6, the Volkswagen ID4, the Polestar (because I keep hectoring them about it, probably, because I love mine so much), the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf, the Kia Niro, the Mustang Mach-E … at whatever price point people are looking, though, no one seems to know that BMW has two EVs that, I need to stress again, reviewers really like.

I actually looked into BMW EVs when I got my Polestar last year. I emailed dealers I’d worked with in the past and got, well, what I can only describe as the runaround. Granted, this was when all cars were hard to find, but the dealers had no ETA on when I could drive an i4 or iX, when they might be in stock, and even a call asking if maybe I’d just be interested in something else entirely?

I never see ads for BMW EVs. I never read about them. Despite some claims that they’re selling great in the US, no BMW shows up in the lists of best-selling EVs of 2022 (so far), or the best-selling EVs of 2021. So maybe they’re just not releasing numbers? Anyway, after empirically falling behind, BMW is apparently hustling now to rush more EVs out the door (in 2019, an analyst told the Financial Times that the company needed to “dare more”). And it’s a shame, because BMW had one of the earliest EVs in the i3, which has turned into a cult classic and an inspiration! I talked with one startup founder who said it was the first EV he bought and that he had it for 10 years and it made him want to build a company around EV charging.

I mean look, I’m sure I’m overthinking this, and the market overall is early enough that BMW will be fine if its claims that it’s ramping up to have half its sales be EVs by 2030 are to be believed. But it feels to me like the company’s heart just isn’t in the transition. Maybe it’s because the driving purists at BMW are in the same camp as the Hot Rod Magazine and even Car & Driver editors who clearly and not-so-secretly hate electric cars because you can’t wrench on them and rev them nice and loud like you can a good old ‘Merican muscle car. (Note: I love a muscle car, too.)

Although, to be honest, BMWs have gotten heavy and bloated over the years, the company has made it impossible to get manual transmissions here in the US, and I can’t say it’s maintained its driving superiority over Audis and even Volvos and increasingly younger, sexier looking Mercedes. So clinging to ICE out of a misguided sense that they’re protecting the driving experience isn’t justifiable (especially when Ford is rocking the actually quite incredible Mach-E GT and the Lightning and advertising both of them all over the place).

Anyway. This is about as first-world as it gets, I know, but you know what? I love BMWs. I tried to hold out for an electric one, and I don’t know when they’re going to be more widely available and frankly, if I’m even going to want one. It’s just interesting to see who’s lagging and who’s running toward the future. The fact that Kia, GM, and Ford have better options in market than BMW, especially considered how fun and exciting EVs are to drive, is pretty sad.

Now, this is where I should point out some other car company laggards. Honda so far just stone-cold refuses—that could be a price thing. Subaru—this one really surprises me given the brand’s hippie-dippie roots. Mazda—probably also price, although the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and Kia Niro are pretty accessible and would likely fit into Mazda and even Honda price territory. Toyota, ironically, despite popularizing plug-in hybrids with the Prius and even taking a flyer on a hydrogen-fueled car.

So BMW doesn’t stand alone here, clearly. But BMW is a carmaker that’s pushed the boundaries on the driving experience, has brand permission to charge premium prices, and is already a brand in decline (in 2020, Tesla reportedly sold more Model 3s than all of BMW’s sedan models combined). Why sit on your hands? Go for it, leapfrog to the future, and give us the ultimate driving experience with feeling, won’t you?

Bits and bobs

Wow, Internet has really ruined real-time sports-watching, hasn’t it? Probably not solvable, but the other day, I was watching the Netherlands-Argentina game while talking to my dad in Montana and texting with my son, and all three of us were on different timelines in the streaming-TV/cable TV multiverse. My son’s feed (streaming Xfinity on his phone from bed) was about 30 seconds behind my live TV via cable box, while my dad’s feed was a full minute ahead of me! We all kept spoiling the action for each other and we finally had to just hang up and wait until it was over to talk about what happened. When I was growing up and living in Omaha while my brother was still in North Dakota, he and I would watch Bulls games together over the phone (and yes, the long-distance bills were staggering), with simultaneous scoring because latency was simply not a thing, apparently. Oh, well. Also, we can all agree that Dec. 9 was like the greatest day in sports in recent memory, right? And also, also, allez les bleus!

Reading: I’m so excited to get a sneak peek at Daniel Suarez’s new book, Critical Mass, which is a sequel to Delta-V, which is a space-adventure corker. I got introduced to him through the Daemon series, which I loved. If you’re just getting started with Suarez, you’ve got lots of fun ahead.

Also, I’m trying not to talk on or about Twitter, and my ongoing break from reading it very often continues to be a plus for my mental health. But I’ll tell you what. Losing Popehat (Ken White) is a real blow, and there have been more and more of those departures lately. It feels like a tide is turning, and that tide is … well. Hate. To circle all the way back up to the top, I did very briefly have a Tesla Model Y, and to be honest, I hated it. I thought the fit and finish were super janky (after all my years in BMWs). I had to super glue part of the body because I bought it before a long road trip and it was flapping in the wind; the air-conditioning crapped out in the desert near the Salton Sea (they told me it had been “overfilled”); the driver’s side visor ripped right out of the roof of the car the first time I used it; I had phantom braking incidents twice at 80 miles an hour on the freeway just using cruise control; the auto-sensing wipers sensed something, for sure, but it wasn’t rain. They were on or off at all the wrong times. The problems with that car were endless, and then came the Hitler meme, and I realized that I was driving my Jewish kid around in this crappy, unsafe car that was inextricably linked to, well. That guy. And I canceled the lease.

And that, dear friends, is how I ended up with my Polestar 2. I love my Polestar 2. I can’t shut up about my Polestar 2. Maybe someday I’ll have a BMW EV but for right now, I’m perfectly content with my life choices.

See you next week!

-Molly