Hypermiling
Hypermiling refers to driving in a way that lets you get as far as possible on a single full tank of fuel. Today, that also applies to EVs with one full battery charge. However, hypermiling an EV isn’t easy because its range depends on many external factors, like weather and driver habits.
A BMW dealer from Canada has just embarked on his own hypermiling adventure in one of the automaker’s newest and most popular EVs, the iX3, and the results are quite surprising.
BMW
More Than Expected
BMWBlog reported that a dealership representative in Ontario drove 628 miles (1,011 km) in a 2027 BMW iX3 50 xDrive on a single full charge. What makes this astonishing is that the EPA rates the iX3 (with the 21-inch wheels) at just 399 miles. Geoff Hills drove the entire way from Niagara Falls to just past Québec City in under 15 hours.
His feat of reaching 628 miles nearly doubles the advertised range by the brand and the EPA, so how did he do it? Hills says that he and the team were inspired after watching BMW’s own 621 (1,000 km) drive, which went from Debrecen, Hungary, to Munich, Germany. Hills is very upfront that his journey was a true hypermiling run: the whole trip, the iX3 was in Max Range mode, with the climate control off, the windows up, and no radio. He adds that it was “a deliberate max range test,” and owners shouldn’t expect to get that kind of mileage on a regular basis.
BMW
The Hard Truth
One thing this test revealed is how tires and rims severely affect an EV’s full range. In BMW’s own test, they fitted smaller 20-inch rims on the car they drove, which the EPA rates at 434 miles on one full charge. That’s a sizeable 35-mile difference from Hill’s car, which ran with the 21-inch tires. Despite the difference, Hill still ran and beat BMW’s official test run, but it came at a cost: he undertook the journey on his own. The automaker handled the official test in Germany with six people.
While Hill’s 628-mile journey seems impossible to believe, BMW China has actually gone further. In August, BMW China traveled 640 miles in an iX3 50L xDrive Long-Wheelbase. Incredibly, the car the China team used has the same battery pack as the standard iX3.
BMW
