I completely disagree that more than 600km of range is required in any scenario.
Let me illustrate. Say 65% of all trips are under 20km. 20% are under 200km, 10% are under 600km and 5% are between 600-2000km. Out of those longest trips, it seems unlikely that you can’t either fast charge or charge overnight, and that you wouldn’t want to have a break at the same time.
If you imagine the battery as 100 building blocks, how many of these blocks see heavy, moderate and close to inexistent use?
85% of the time, 50 of those blocks are dead weight. If you add more blocks, for 99 out of every 100 trips, you would only be carrying more dead weight.
For every block you are not using on every trip, that cell is dead weight, polluting to produce, wears your tires more, makes the car worse to drive, and costs you money without giving anything back.
The optimal range is the range you are willing to drive in one session, plus the practical range of getting to a fast chargers, plus spare capacity for peace of mind. I’d say that’s 450km, for me. In addition it should be able to handle a long day of many errands city driving of course.
If you add more cells to todays battery of the i4, you will add weight that only gets utilized the times you need to drive very, very far, with it any charging options, practically <1% of trips. It’s an unrealistic edge case and that’s why BMW is focusing on home charging and realistic use cases. It’s not hard to make a car with a huge battery, but just.. why would you.