Brandon Turkus goes over the charging issues with the BMW X5 xDrive40e.
TranscriptBRANDON TURKUS: Hey Autoblog, Brandon Turkus still here with the BMW X5 xDrive40e. I'm going to talk to you about the Sport and Comfort and ECO PRO settings, and the eDrive button. This is the most important thing about the X5 plug-in. You really have to kind of drive it strategically and keep your wits about you to get the most out of it.
And if we go into-- there's the energy flow right now because I'm parked and nothing's really happening-- but if I hit the eDrive button, it gives you three options-- auto e Drive, Max eDrive, and Save. And they're all pretty self-explanatory. Auto eDrive, the computer manages everything. Max eDrive is pure electric, and Save is nothing but gas, but you're recharging the battery.
And that's kind of important because you only get about 15 miles to a charge based on my experience with this car. So, more likely than not, there are going to be times where you have to recharge it yourself. And that's where the Sport, Comfort, and ECO PRO settings come into play.
Now, based on what I've seen-- we'll switch over to ECO PRO-- nothing really seems to happen in terms of recharging with ECO PRO. There's very little regen, and the gas engine isn't used to actively turn on the electric motor and charge the battery, but Comfort and Sport especially you can get a lot of energy from a very short distance of driving.
As you can see, I have 24% battery right now, and I just conducted a very non-scientific experiment. I drove the five miles from my house to the Autoblog office, and I started with 8%. I had the car set to Sport and Save, so the most aggressive regeneration with the ability to [? suck ?] away all the battery power that you're generating. And I went from 8% to-- it wasn't 25% a second ago, but because I'm parked, it's still drawing a charge. So that's a 17% gain. That's not terrible, and I've gotten bigger gains during my test with this car.
It all just depends on are you willing to drive in Sport, and you're going to use a little bit more gas. But if you really want to take advantage of that electric power, especially if you're going to be doing a long freeway drive where you really can't use the electric EV Only mode. It only goes up to 75 miles an hour, then the gas engine kicks in. If you're doing that, then it's a good opportunity to switch it over to Sport or even Comfort and put it in Save and try and recharge the batteries. But it's particularly handy if, like me, you don't always have access to a fast charger. So there you go.
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