UK Owner Review - 2 Months with my i4 e-drive 40

Hi Everyone,

This has taken me a while to get round to but now I’ve had my car for a couple of month’s here are my impressions so far.

A bit of background, I do love my cars, I’ve owned several BMW’s previously including a couple of 3 series coupe’s and an M235i Coupe, a Porsche Boxster and most recently the latest Audi TT Coupe, so quite a fan of the 2 door cars.

I work in IT/Tech so I’m always interested in what is out there and knew one day I’d probably be driving an electric car. During mid 2021 I decided I was going to make the jump, I work from home these days and don’t do huge mileage but with the price of fuel on the rise I was surprised home much I was spending each month so I started to look at what options were available.

The i4 was being reported as production starting soon (this would be late August 2021), I really liked the look of it and it was a grand coupe, so my first car with 4 passenger doors ! I decided I would lease this car for 3 years as I do like to change my cars quite often. So my order was placed for an i4 edrive40 M-Sport in September 2021 and the long wait began……

I was given all sorts of dates from the lease broker/dealer – December 2021, then January, then March. I did question if the order had actually been placed and was assured it had. The lease broker provided me with a screenshot from the dealer showing the production number, with a status of 111 and a production date of the 1st week in May 2022, from that stage onwards I could enquire about the status via the chat function on the BMW website.

Whilst I waited for the i4 I took advantage of the high used car values and sold my Audi TT for more than I paid for it – this is a first for me, in all the cars I’ve owned, they nearly always end up costing me money to get out of them. I would need an interim car and settled on a solution of using a service called Onto. Onto are an electric car subscription service – essentially you pay a fixed fee and that covers the car, insurance, maintenance and charging via public chargers.

I opted for a VW ID3, I’ve owned a couple of Golf’s before and VW make a good solid product and I was curious to see what their first fully electric effort was like. In summary – it’s not bad, spacious, quick but the software is truly dire, really laggy and not intuitive to use. The interior is more functional than luxurious with some hard plastics.

I ended up living with the ID3 for 9 months and it did get me through the winter and finally in early April my i4 went to status 112 – scheduled for production, it stayed on track and by the first week in May it hist status 150, it was being built, I was so excited ! I hounded that chat function on the BMW website and I think it was completed on a Thursday and by Sunday it was sat at the port in Germany ready to be shipped to the UK.

I had to wait another couple of weeks to get my hands on it, I bid farewell to the VW and got the train up to Newcastle to collect my car from the supplying dealer.




The spec of my car is absolutely standard, I went for the M-Sport spec as I prefer the look to that from the sport but the only other extra I paid for was paint – Portimao Blue, I love the colour and it’s one the things the car gets complimented on a lot. Specification wise the standard spec has everything I personally need, sure gadgets are fun and big fancy wheels look great but I was really happy when I saw it in the metal.

The first drive back from the dealer was 150 mile motorway journey and it absolutely breezed it, I was really impressed with the efficiency (4miles/kwh) and how comfortable the car the was, a real joy to drive and certainly living up to BMW’s tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine” and I love the power when you hit the accelerator !

Over the 2 months I’ve owned it I’ve covered short, medium and longer journey’s. The software in this car is fantastic, really slick, fast and responsive. Integration to my phone (apple) is also spot on using carplay. The My BMW app is also really good, this allows you see the state of charge, location of the car & you start the air-conditioning remotely so the car is nice and cool inside on those hot days.

The app also lets you track your charging sessions and see how much it’s costing to run the car, I had a home charger installed (Hypervolt) and by taking advantage of 4 hours cheap off-peak electricity at 7.5p/kwh I managed to cover 1000 miles and it cost me around about £25.

I do have a dog and recently I had the boot measured for a custom boot liner, once this arrives I’ll put up another post as I know a number of you will have dogs.

So all in all I love it, I suppose if I were to pick up on some very minor issues I would say in certain light conditions the top of the dashboard reflects onto the windscreen. Also the front seat passenger seatbelt sometimes doesn’t go back as it should and causes a rattle.

For those still waiting for their cars – keep the faith, it is worth the wait. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask and I’ll respond as soon as I can.