I drove electric car for a week – but didn't charge it once

I don’t know about you, but living with anxiety can be incredibly rubbish some days.However, one place I have rarely felt any anxiety is driving a car. A friend once said that when I have some pedals and a wheel (sometimes with a gearstick) in front of me, I suddenly become the most calm, focused, and confident version of myself. They were right, but there was one type of driving that used to unstick me. Driving a long distance in an electric car.

Even if I knew the vehicle would get from point A to point B and back to A and still have 40 percent charge left with a quick charge, and even though I’ve charged up many an electric car in the past few years, I would still get anxious.

So, I decided it was time to nip this in the bud and see what it would be like to live with a BMW i4 for a week. It came fully charged, with an estimated range of just under 300 miles. But I decided to put it to the test by not charging it again for the duration of my time with it.

The i4 is BMW’s electric super saloon, a competitor to Porsche’s Taycan and Audi’s e-Tron GT, both of which are related, and both of which I have driven for the Daily Express. The model I lived with was the G26 i4 M50 LCI, or BMW i4 M50 for short.

Like a lot of premium electric cars the i4 is quite large. At two metres wide and nearly five metres in length it’s not small. What’s more, weighing in at 2,290kg or 2.29 tonnes, it’s not light either.

This doesn’t sound promising until you find out it’s packing 400kw (536hp in old money), 795Nm of torque, and a 0-62 time of 3.9 seconds. Put that power to the ground through a sophisticated electronics system and some good tyres and you won’t be holding up traffic.

Lots of power is all good, but it doesn’t matter when you’re in a city as congested as London, which is why one evening I attempted to park in Soho. The idea was to test the i4’s manoeuvrability and useability down some of London’s tighter avenues before finding out how easy it was to park.

After finding a space in one of London’s most popular tourist areas parking was thankfully quite easy thanks to the bevy of parking aids and cameras which enable you to guide the i4 in.

What’s more, as the i4 is slightly boxier in style and the driving position is slightly higher up than some of its competition, threading it between cars or down narrow streets feels slightly easier and thus judging turns is a little more natural too.

Town driving done, it was time to test the i4’s practicality with a trip to Brighton and a cycling trip across the South Downs. This meant folding the seats and loading up the car with a bicycle and two persons worth of kit.

Front wheel removed from the bicycle and it slipped into the i4 with several bags and plenty of space to spare. The i4 has a good wide aperture and the boot lip isn’t too high making things quite easy.

Heading out on the journey with 80 percent battery I knew the car had enough to do the distance, but how would the weight, the hot weather, air con, and varying speeds affect the predicted range?

In truth, not much. The i4 ended up behaving like every single petrol car I’ve taken on that journey. In town efficiency is much reduced, but out on the motorway at cruising speeds varying from 50 to 70mph and the range steadily increased.

Yes, we were in EcoPro mode, but that’s what I normally put my petrol car in anyway. Over a 52-odd mile journey we only lost 20 miles of range. The return journey ended up being a similar story, losing around 30 miles over the distance, but this wasn’t helped by the drive up the A23 being almost entirely uphill.

On both runs, my passenger and I made a series of observations. Firstly, that we were both glad of the buttons on the centre console near the cupholders, but wish there had been shortcut switches beneath the main touch screen.

The second is that the i4 is definitely a car that prefers motorways and dual carriageways and not British B-roads. The car handles the bumps sure, but you can feel the weight underneath you and the steering isn’t as communicative as it is in the Audi e-Tron GT.

What’s more, on twisting tarmac you notice the width a bit more and wonder what it would be like with 500kg taken out of the equation. These aren’t car ruining problems as the interior and infotainment system were easy to work out and understand, and this isn’t a car designed to spend most of its time on B-roads anyway.

What was most surprising about the i4 was that throughout my entire week with it I didn’t feel a drop of range anxiety. Yes, I looked at the predicted range, but more out of curiosity than anything else.

Maybe it’s the benefit of experience from doing more long distances in electric and non-electric cars since my last proper zero emissions journey, but it was refreshing to jump in a battery powered car and not have that little worry whirring away in the back of my head.