Sunday, March 11, 2012

Bad Karma for Consumer Reports


As the ActiveE is a field trial of BMW’s Project i, its not surprising that there are bumps in the road.  Electronauts are finding a variety of issues that are being reported back to BMW, and that’s the point – all of the bugs need to be worked out prior to the roll out of the i3. 

One of the issues that has been occurring is a fault that renders the vehicle undriveable.  In most cases the fault can be cleared by letting the vehicle sit for a few minutes to an hour after cycling the key on and off.  In a small percentage of the cases, the fault did not clear and the vehicles had to be towed back to BMW to clear the fault.

As I mentioned earlier, situations like this aren’t surprising and should be expected – especially in the first few months that the cars are on the streets – it’ll take some time for BMW to work out fixes for the issues that come up.

Having said that, we’d be a lot less forgiving of the issues if this was a $110k production car.  Turns out that Fisker, the maker of the Karma may be having similar issues.  Here’s guessing that the folks at Fisker wished that it was any other Karma that had the problem…

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