Why buy a used BMW i4 with Exchange and Mart?
The ICE age, as in 'Internal Combustion Era', is almost over and BMW is ready for what lies beyond. This car, the i4, was at launch the most important EV the brand had introduced to date. And there's a good case for calling it the most important BMW for decades.
The company's been dabbling with EVs for a very long time now, ever since its 'Project i' division produced the ground-breaking little i3 back in 2013. After that though, there was a rather disappointing seven year gap, at the end of which we got a conventional looking EV version of the X3 (the iX3), then a year later, what looked like a properly dedicated design, the iX, which did in fact merely run on a (heavily modified) version of the company's combustion-orientated CLAR platform. The i4, launched in 2022, isn't designed around a properly bespoke EV platform either - that's coming with the 'Neue Klasse' EV models the company's introducing later in this decade. But it is very much a 'proper' BMW, as we're about to find out.
When you imagine a 'proper' BMW, the car you tend to think of is a 3 Series saloon and if you were to conceptualise one of those as an EV, this is pretty close to what you might end up with. Actually, this i4 has a bit more in common with the brand's swoopier 4 Series Gran Coupe, not least because it has a swept-back GT silhouette with a tailgate rather than a boot. Anyway, what you need to know is that there's lots of carry-over between this i4 and those 3 and 4 Series models, all three designs made at the same BMW Group Plant Munich German factory.
This car gets the fifth-generation of the brand's advanced 'eDrive' system, which incorporates this Bavarian maker's latest battery, motor, and charging technologies. And it's intended as a sportier alternative to pricier versions of more established Executive mid-sized EV sporting models, nearly all of them cars that really were designed from the ground-up as EVs, like the Tesla Model 3, the Polestar 2, the Hyundai IONIQ 6, the Kia EV6 and the Volkswagen ID.7.
