ⓘ BMW
Thanks to the sixth generation of its Tesla 4680-style battery and drivertrain, BMW was able to squeeze the utmost efficiency from the new i3. The sedan used only 14 kWh per 100 miles on the road.
BMW has just put a big number on the Neue Klasse i3 as the i3 50L trim travelled 1,213 km (about 754 miles) without recharging, which makes it the longest single-charge run ever achieved by one of its electric cars.
The test took place on a mix of expressways, national highways, rural roads, and big city driving. The sedan reached its destination with just 1% of the 113.4 kWh LFP battery left. BMW reports an average consumption of 8.8 kWh per 100 km, or roughly 7 miles per kWh, which is an excellent figure for a car of this size.
It is not a certified range under a standardized cycle like WLTP or CLTC, though, and it won't necessarily be repeatable at highway speeds in cold weather, but as a real-world efficiency showcase, it is hard to ignore. This is a company result from a specific road test, and the efficiency number lands in a crowded company.
Lucid's Air Grand Touring, for instance, holds the Guinness title for the longest journey by an electric car on a single charge, at 1,205 km, set in July 2025. Lucid also led the 2026 winter edition with 520 km in temperatures as low as minus 31°C. On efficiency, BMW's claimed 8.8 kWh per 100 km is almost identical to the 8.7 kWh per 100 km Mercedes achieved with its Vision EQXX concept on a real road trip from Sindelfingen to Cassis.
Volkswagen has since gone lower with its Mission Efficiency prototype, which claims 7.51 kWh per 100 km on a 1,278 km drive from Wolfsburg to Vienna, but that figure comes with caveats, as the VW averaged just 67.72 km/h and was charged once along the way, and it is a one-off prototype, whereas the i3 is a production sedan. For a more familiar comparison, the Mercedes CLA EV used 23.2 kWh per 100 miles in Edmunds testing, while BMW's figure works out to about 14.2 kWh per 100 miles, though the routes aren't directly comparable.
The announcement coincides with the start of the automaker’s Gen 6 battery production in Shenyang, China. BMW has invested 10 billion yuan (around $1.49 billion) in the facility, which spans 240,000 square meters and is about five times the size of its existing battery plants there.
The Gen 6 cells are large cylindrical units similar to the Tesla 4680 battery in the Cybertruck, paired with an 800V architecture and BMW's sixth-generation electric drive. The batteries will initially power the Neue Klasse iX3 and i3. Shenyang also builds the homebrew Energy Master control unit, so all three core components of the drive system are now made locally to save on manufacturing costs in the cutthroat Chinese EV industry.
The i3 50L is a China-bound sedan with a 3,005 mm wheelbase, 39 mm longer than the previous i3 built there. It uses localized services such as driver assistance tech developed with Momenta, plus AI voice features created with Alibaba and DeepSeek. Preorders for the long wheelbase iX3 started in August, with deliveries due in November.
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Daniel Zlatev - Senior Tech Writer - 2264 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2021
Wooed by tech since the industrial espionage of Apple computers and the times of pixelized Nintendos, Daniel went and opened a gaming club when personal computers and consoles were still an expensive rarity. Nowadays, fascination is not with specs and speed but rather the lifestyle that computers in our pocket, house, and car have shoehorned us in, from the infinite scroll and the privacy hazards to authenticating every bit and move of our existence.