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Great question! I actually test drove one on a lark ~2 years before buying the Model 3. At the time, Model S aside, I basically pictured electric cars as economy cars. As in, why on earth would you pay $40-$45k for a BMW commuter appliance EV instead of $30k (or whatever) for a Leaf? Once I drove it, I got it. It was a legitimately nice car inside; it clicked. "Right, for the same reason people pay more for premium cars that are powered by internal combustion motors!" I had to take it seriously because around the time we got the 3, PG&E was offering something like $10k in rebates on the i3 on top of state+federal credits. I never got serious about pricing, but to me that suggested that I could have a new i3 for $22.5k, or less than half the price of of a Model 3! The reality is that the i3 serves an entirely different market. Yes, our Tesla sees 99% commuting miles, but when buying a "nice, new" car (which is novel to me), it kind of needs to be able to do it all. I found the Range Extender solution on the i3 to be pretty janky, and I don't remotely trust DCFC networks that are not-Tesla. This might be FUD; after all, non-Tesla DCFC was probably better in 2018 when I bought my car than Superchargers were in (say) 2015, but it's useful FUD. The range on the i3 is simply too short. You can't really take it anywhere, and I want my nice new car to be able to take me to the mountains, to see my family 500 miles away, etc. Now, of course, for the money savings, there's the usual "well, rent a car for the 2 times a year you take a long roadtrip", and that's probably the rational solution, but I don't really feel that buying a car is entirely rational; I think it's largely emotional, and people construct post-hoc justifications for why buying the car they WANTED was the CORRECT choice. I ended up selling a nice roadtrippable car for about $30k when we bought the Tesla, which means if we had bought the i3 I'd have kept the other car, and it would have been a more expensive proposition overall, to own a less capable EV. Then, later, I bought a diesel SUV that's very nice for roadtrips so I guess the Tesla doesn't have to do it all, but, hey, like I said, it's not all rational. Oh, and the i3-- it drove REALLY well. I was super impressed by the power and handling. I couldn't believe the grip on such narrow tires. I loved the interior, although the exterior was a bit of a mixed bag for me. We'd have to charge it every single night for commuting, where we charge the Tesla every 3 days or so, but honestly that's not such a drag, it would be more of an issue on days where you want to cover a lot of miles in one day. (lots of errands on a weekend day for example). |