BMW i8 Year in Review - Would We Buy Again??

hi everybody I'm Franny and I'm Heidi and today we're gonna give you our one-year owners perspective on the BMW i8 now we've already done a complete review on this car before we actually owned the car so we'll go ahead and link that up here so you can check that out what we want to do today is just go over all the things we've done to the car and sort of our thoughts and opinions on the car now that we've had it for a full year and whether or not we would actually go ahead and buy the car again if given the opportunity the first thing I want to cover is something we did kind of right when we got the car pretty soon thereafter was to put on paint protection film on the front car from pretty much the a-pillar forward and then we ceramic-coated the car after that now we also have a video for that too so I'll go ahead and link that up here too but I think that was one of the best things we could have done because it makes the car so easy to keep clean I can use a duster on it just a big car duster and then to clean the wheels I also ceramic-coated the wheels and it makes it super easy to do those too and if you look around right now you'll notice that there's a lot of snow on the ground and one of the reasons why we wanted to protect the car was really for all of the stuff that they put on the roads mm-hmm you know the salt and all the rocks and gravel and stuff so it really helps a lot I think that was very well worth doing right so that's a big a plus we're really happy about that so the next thing I'm going to talk about is the tint that's been done to the car and personally I like the tint on the car one of the reasons why I like it is that it keeps the car so dark that people can't really see like what kind of stuff you're storing in the car and I think it looks really cool but Franny doesn't like the tint nearly as much and I'll have to agree with her when driving the car at night so go ahead and elaborate on that for two reasons I really don't like the tint that much now with Heidi I'd like the look of it but Therese and I don't like it is when you're out driving around it's very difficult to see in the car now some imagine people get tinting for that exact reason but I think it also makes it a little bit easier for people to be a little less than completely cordial on the road if they can actually see a person in the car I think they react better to that right and this car Garner's a decent amount of attention so that's my one first point but then the second one is at night it's so hard to see on the side of the car so we have roundabouts and things on our travels that we have to go through and when you do you can't see the edge from the left side out the driver's side window because of the tint and I never know where the edge of the roundabout is right so I think it's also a safety concern as well right and Franny is driving the car more at night she does drive it into work and so I can understand her complaint and I certainly do understand it now most the time when I'm driving it would be the grocery store and it won't be that dark but when I have driven at night it's been kind of that way as well where you're like yeah I can't really see where I'm going mm-hmm the next thing I'd like to cover is sort of the efficiency and the charging versus the gas because this car is a hybrid the EPA says this car gets about 76 miles per gallon so it's our little adjusted miles per gallon in sport mode and on just the engine you can see somewhere between 29 and 30 miles per gallon on the car this isn't really that bad no actually it's quite good for a car like race and with this performance and part of that is because the car is actually pretty light but it has a very small battery it's only 7.1 kilowatt hours of which about five or so is really useful and we only get about a 15-mile range and that's what the spec said and I would say would you say we get somewhere between 14 and 16 17 absolutely so as high as 19 so we're just talking about the electric range just like we get out here just 19 right so much weights back and forth a little bit right and I did some calculations our our energy here in Colorado costs about 12 cents per kilowatt hour and so to fill it up takes about 60 cents and it easily charges overnight that's no problem on a 110 outlet just in the garage no modifications just use the charger came with the car right yeah completely drained I think I've seen it say like either 7 or 7 and a half hours yeah there you go there you go overnight yeah so that works really really well now if you our gas here let's say our gases I don't know let's say it's three dollars a gallon for premium which is what you have to put in here it's actually a little less but let's just use that and if we're going to fifteen miles that means we're going to at 29 miles per gallon we're gonna be somewhere around a dollar 55 something like that so it's about a ninety five cent difference between the two so you know we're not we're not taking huge loads of money to the bank by using the electric nose and when Franny goes downtown it is far enough that she will absolutely have to use some of the gas to get down there so we know that we will have to fill up the car but it's a really good point though because most of our trips that we've found with this car we can do almost all of it in electric as we close so that's me guy going to the grocery on errands I literally like him just kind of pulling back in and seeing the EON empty and that's the other thing is even with Franny driving down town once a week we're only filling the car up like what once a month yeah I know it's so new and far between on the bill okay trips to the gas station yeah so I really like the fact that we don't have to visit the gas station nearly as often so it's more of a convenience thing I guess is the point that's pretty cool the electric bit also helps with the performance as well so when you're at sport mode it will torque fill with the electric motors if there's enough power in there so it's kind of a really neat feature I think on the car and one that we were kind of hoping we would use and it's actually been a big plus I think yep so I want to talk to you about the practicality of the car I think I'm the one that uses it more often for errands and such and one of the things that I often do is I'll consider before I take it out what kind of errands I'm going to be going on possibly where I'm going to be parking some of the things that I usually want to consider is how easy it's going to be to get in and out of a parking lot how tight the cars generally are parking and you know what kind of parking lot there is so when I go and get my hair done I love the parking lot there because I can usually park really far away and it's really nice dry and I really enjoy driving my car and I don't have to worry about cars around me so do you feel that that's inconvenient to you does that does that degrade your it's your fun with the car and sort of your experience at all I it I do take it into account a little bit if I know there's gonna be super tight parking and there literally is an experience for me at least it happens in our garage if I park too close to the wall in our garage and I pull too far over just to keep the car away from the other car I won't be able to open the door up and I actually can't get out of the car so it is something to consider but I would say nine times out of ten or ninety five times out of a hundred I will be able to find a place to park and if anything I try to find a parallel parking spot as well I will never have to worry about it if I'm parking on the street now we do have a small issue when we pull into the garage we have to pull the mirrors in so the bird's-eye view camera doesn't work when the mirrors are already in so that's something we learned the turning radius on the car is pretty crummy so you might have to kind of do your turns a couple of times in very tight areas the car to me feels ginormous because all of our cars are fairly small right it's wide and it's long but if you remember from the Tesla review right and some of the pictures from that the Tesla Model 3 is about the same size as this car but I was just really surprised I was like I thought that was kind of a smallish car the next area I want to talk to you about is the door access and in particular the butterfly doors so they look really cool and they do attract a lot of attention and they are really great but it does mean getting in and out of the car for one but you have to go in but first so that's might not be something that you're used to men especially it's more of a ladies thing when they have a skirt on and it's a tight pencil skirt that they'll go but first into a car so you kind of have to pretend like you're wearing a skirt the reverse happens when it comes to getting out and so definitely make sure that you try that but honestly it's more how you do it then just sort of the obstacle of that that doorsill so if you go in but first swing your legs around to get in and then the reverse is Heidi said to swing your legs out then you sort of push up on the door sill and lift yourself out and it becomes sort of a fluid motion after a while I know there's a lot of silly videos of people falling out of these cars but it's not that they're just being silly and they're just you know whatever but actually I haven't found it to be that big of a deal now you do something also as well when you get out of the car to make it easier when you get in the next time oh right and because of the steering wheel I have to push the seat all the way back and then I'll sit in it and then I'll bring it all the way back forward because my legs are so short so it's not so much of an issue for Frannie because she has longer leg no and it's pretty easy for me but that works really well for Heidi so something to try if you're thinking about one of these cars right um another thing to remember about these seats is they don't have a memory now my opinion on the doors is that I like them better than just normal swinging doors because the swinging doors seem to in order to get enough egress in and out of them they have to move almost all the way out right and you almost never have that kind of room certainly not in our garage and in most parking lots as well as the doors go up they take up about half the width of an open door I find that pretty easy to get in and out of and I think it's a good use of space as I mentioned before this car is a 2015 model so BMW installed their I Drive from that period and I know it's not super awesome it's missing the Apple I the Apple play and the Android auto right so it doesn't really interface really well with your phone either now the navigation on it is okay I guess it sort of works it's kind of what you'd expect from I now four or five years ago right yeah but I find the whole system not SuperDuper useful kind of a small screen as well so I'm not sure exactly yeah and phones do 99% of what you needed to do anyway so exactly so navigation is the thing right and so I'm fine with it almost being on my phone and just using Google navigation works pretty well and then you can Bluetooth the audio to the interior sound system then takes a few tries to kind of figure that out but once you get it sort of sorted it does work and so that's saying so you'll be able to hear it through the speakers and things so I think that's pretty helpful I guess I do like the map on it so if you're in a neighborhood you want to kind of see a bird's-eye view of where you are I actually do like that yeah that does help now BMW also has something called their BMW connected app that goes on your phone and that's so common with cars nowadays but it's actually I find that actually very useful it allows you to set the climate inside the car so you can climate eyes now or you can climate ties to a schedule no one kind of Carius thing is that you can't set the temperature wait yeah I know it's kind of weird so I guess it just basically climatized as to whatever you've got the climate system set to on the car so if you guys set to 72 degrees it'll just warm it up too or cool it down either way now the cool thing about that of course this being a plug-in hybrid if it's plugged in while you're doing that you're not using any power out of the batteries because none of these accessories are actually physically connected to the engine right so because of that they're all little electric motors to run the air conditioning and then the heat is a heat pump on this car which is kind of cool pretty certain about that and it works really well but if it's plugged in then you're just using your wall current to heat up your car you get in your car it could be freezing outside or even cold in your garage and with it's yeah which sometimes gets and then the cars toasty warm and you're doodling down the road and you're totally comfortable and you're not turning on all the heated seats and turn the heat all the way on and stuff like that when I go in the garage in the car feels like it does inside yeah it's nice and warm so that's what I really like now the app also has a few other things it gives you the location the last time the car was parked which is kind of nice they'll tell you if the car is actually in transit let's see what else oh it gives you efficiency on your car and things like how you're doing electric wise and how you did gas in your miles per gallon and all that sort of stuff with history which is kind of nice the other thing it will also do for you in the app is tell you if you've got service intervals coming up so if you need an oil change spark plugs or whatever needs to get done on the engine simple stuff like that now yeah I think you can also schedule an appointment if you have W yeah it's actually really useful it's on your phone you always have access to it that part I really like yeah so that's really cool like to talk to you a little bit about the maintenance we've had to do on the car and any repairs we've done over the year it's actually been really really good when we bought the car and we actually when you had it in to the shop to get the PPF and the ceramic coating we were noticing that the big battery was dropping and that's the drive battery kept dropping and that turned out to be a bad little battery so all of these cars have a 12-volt battery and of course their high voltage battery the 12-volt battery handles all the accessories on the car does the same stuff it does on every car but it had a bad cell in it so it was it was dropping and the big battery will go ahead and charge that battery but since it had to do it all the time it was dying so we took it to the dealership was still barely under warranty at the time and it's they've replaced the battery and at the same time we also had the rear view mirror weirdly replaced because the one of the home link buttons didn't work yeah I wouldn't program properly they spent like two seconds on it they're like yeah whatever and they just put a new one in he'll be super expensive it's like we spent like a grand well we didn't spend a grand but it would have been grand between the battery and the home links yeah but the battery wasn't that expensive a total costs on the battery was close to three hundred dollars because it's it's actually key VIN wise to the car so whatever but it's actually worth having w do that for you in the future even exactly placements are pretty easy yep yeah so the other thing I didn't on the car course was an oil change did a video on that as well I wasn't linked that up there too so you can see it the oil change is actually super simple on the car it's not hard at all it's just a standard sort of cup oil filter thing with an element in the inside of it I really like those because you can see the element it doesn't use that much oil at all and it's but it's kind of a weird oil we made sure we bought all BMW parts oil and also the filter as well now we have a couple of things coming up that we want to do on the car as well I want to swap out the air filter that cabin filter and then I think our struts are a little weak on the door it should really go all the way up and stay all the way up and it goes like chest just stop sort of shy of the top and just sort of hangs out up there I was talking to Pat from I Pat's garage and he said that and he just did a video on swapping out these struts so check that out as well but he said that they kind of go out after about every year and they're supposed to be close to 40,000 miles but yeah this car only has about what yes no we haven't but that strut really should be I think we're gonna have to replace it not the end of the world but something to do so one of the things that we also knew that we would be doing is we would be driving this car in the wintertime so as far as the maintenance item goes we often have snow tires and summer tires and we usually for convenience sake put them on separate rims what I had no idea what should be very difficult was to find a rim size and a wheel size that would work with this car and because of the staggered sizes it made it a little bit hard to find snow tires and in fact my advice to you is if you are looking for Porsches or BMWs or anything else that has staggered tires to go to Nokian first and that is kind of where I wish that I had gone but they really aren't that commonly listed in some of the big websites like tires comm so I spent hours and hours looking for snow tires and I'd find two that fit the front but then I wouldn't find them for the back and so on and so forth I was finally able to find Nokian and I won't even attempt to say the name of the type of snow tires that they are we were able to find the rims on eBay for a pretty good price just under a thousand dollars and these are just the stock rims in fact they're identical to the rooms we had for the car already so they're the standard stock rims the W's that come with a car and they had some road rash they weren't perfect right and we had snow tires installed and we had a little mishap and you probably have seen the a flat tire video that we put out but one of the things that we hadn't considered is this car gets a flat tire how low to the ground it is and ground clearance when putting a jack underneath it yeah so that made it kind of difficult and also of course the car doesn't come with a spare tire either so you we were lucky because we had the summer wheels and tires set as well so we just grabbed the appropriate wheel and tire offset normally we have a tire repair kit which we did but that wouldn't have worked in this case and right worst case is we would have had to get towed and had we been someplace with no cell service would have been on foot until the nearest place yeah super inconvenient yes but that's kind of the direction that cars are going in general yeah it's totally true yeah I'm pretty much all of our cars don't have spare tires on them so right so we have a we have a tire repair kit that we use and a 12-volt compressor and that usually if you get a nail and tire it's gonna work great for that you get a slash on the sidewall earn our case a broken valve stem and now not gonna work so something else to think about with these modern cars but snow tires are really important especially in Colorado where we live because the temperature keeps going all over the place and so do the conditions so winter tires are formulated with a special type of rubber that gets much better traction in winter than normal tires or summer tires do and there's a good chance it could be beautiful out and you're out and about all day and then all of a sudden it starts to snow on your way home right think it's super scary so fast right and then all of a sudden you're running on summer tires and you're in a really bad place so having winter tires on the car I think is a big benefit it was a little bit expensive but if you're gonna drive the car in the winter so we use this one as a winter car and we drive the Porsche Turbo I know it sounds funny as our snow car now I did drive this to work one time when there was a lot of snow actually on the road so pretty slippery conditions a lot of ice and stuff and I noticed that interestingly I had it in Eco mode which means it should pretty much be 100% electric in just the front wheels on the electrical but the engine was humming along the entire time and that's because the car realized that oh you know what we're a little low on traction so I'm gonna fire up the engine and make it available if we really need to keep that rear end planted or whatever we need to do it's going to be ready to go because remember they're not physically connected so you don't start up the engine and the front wheels will actually turn there have to be powered by the electric motor so it's it's separate and finally we'd like to give you our conclusions on the car after owning it for a year I think Heidi Nagano a little different take on the car but I think between the two of us we absolutely adore this car right why don't you tell why don't you tell what you think Heidi well despite the fact that I talked about parking and having to kind of consider that it doesn't mean it couldn't be my only daily driver I I do like it a lot I like it said before I hate having to fill up with gas I like the fact that I can just come home plug it in and it literally will start over the very next day and have pretty much a full tank so if we didn't have to take the car to downtown Denver and just totaled around here a lot then we wouldn't even be filling it up with gas hardly at all and I love that fact but I also like the attention I like to be able to talk to people about the newer technology there's a lot of people that will come up I mean I had like two people at the grocery store asking me about it and funny a lot of people think this car is 100% electric they see it maybe they see how interesting it looks and I usually tell no no it's it's it's so but yeah I would definitely consider buying the car or even a newer version of this car and I'm actually a little disappointed to hear that BMW will not continue after 2020 with the eyeline so yeah they're done making the car so that's a good point because these cars when we bought this car now they're really on sale and bright you know these cars you can't buy a car like this on the market unless you spend an enormous amount of money no so one of the things about the i8 is that it really doesn't do anything better than any other car it just does a lot things all together and between the whole suite of things it does there's very few cars that can actually say they're carbon fiber tub that they're hybrid that they're they look like a super look like a super car they've gotten these butterfly doors and all the great features in this car that get really good gas mileage super easy to drive built by a major manufacturer I mean it's a really nice car and certainly for the 60,000 or so that these cars are trading at now between 60 and 70 oh this is a steal this thing's awesome so it's a really fun car it's fast enough it may not be the fastest car on the road but it's perfect for our roads I think fast off the line though it is so it's quick and I think it's not overpowered as well the minute you go you know into the mid threes and stuff then the cars are just too fast the fun's over too fast one of the things people this is that is the Augmented sound I wish that the I wish you had a little more control over it so you could turn it off if you wanted to or at least turn it down you really only only only hear it in sport she likes it quite actually I mean it's a good sound and it's it sounds pretty sporty but I think overall I really love this car I just love the way it drives I love that it's quiet I love the ride on it there are the asymmetrical miss yeah the styling on it is great it really is it's very interesting very different it's a very special car and I can see maybe 10 15 years down the road these things being I'm quite desirable because they didn't make a zillion of them I only made about 2,000 of them for this model year which isn't a huge production at all so I don't know it's a neat car it works well too it's comfortable it's a nice place to be and BMW will have to support it for 10 years following the discontinuation of the line this is a good point because you know that the dealerships and the and the car manufacturers are going to support this car going forward now we're hoping that it's not going to be super duper expensive that there aren't going to be any problems but I you know and looking in the forums and stuff this there haven't been any major issues with this car and all niggly stuff yeah exactly so and the rest of the fit and finish on the stuff it's not like there's broken buttons on it and stuff like that anywhere at all either it seems to be holding up really well I think our final conclusion is big question is would we buy it again in Heidi what would you say oh absolutely yeah me too I don't I don't regret our decision to buy it when we did no no we love the car the 2019 cars I think had a little more power a little more range but he did a little bit and of course you could get the Roadster we chose the Cabriolet we really hope you enjoyed this hope you found it useful thank you so so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments go ahead and leave them down below and we'll get right to them and a special thank you to our patreon supporters absolutely so all right well if you haven't subscribed to the channel go ahead and hit the subscribe button in a little bit next to it to get notified and if we notified next time we upload a video we upload lots of stuff we're in the middle of a Porsche 3-2 Carrera project we just finished a video and posted it on Lamborghini Countach is oil change so we did some kind of crazy nutty stuff too alright well thank you so so much for watching and until next time safe travels bye

Channel: Heidi and Franny Sailing

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Id: Ranw1vF_HcI

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020