Lord please please please, Take away my anxiety

I'm not sure it's what the Black Eyed Peas had in mind, but I'd be happy if someone took away my ActiveE anxiety.  When you read the title to this blog post, I’m betting that you were thinking that this would be a post on Range Anxiety.  Guess again!  Rather, its a post about ‘fault anxiety'.  'Fault anxiety' you say?  What on earth is 'fault anxiety'?

First a bit of background.  We took delivery of our ActiveE on March 12^th.  Until last Thursday we had 2 ½ weeks of problem free driving in our EV.  We had a trip planned to Augusta National to attend Monday's Practice Round at the Masters and were flying out last Friday.  While we weren’t planning on driving the ActiveE to the airport as the roundtrip drive was outside of the car's 100 mile range and we had no way to charge at the airport, we had typically used it for every other trip we’ve made since we took delivery.  Then came last Thursday.

Amen Corner

A certain someone (you might remember her from my “Somebody don’t got no stinkin’ range anxiety” post) had driven the car to work, and got a warning indicating that the transmission could not be put into "park" mode and to use the parking brake and visit the nearest dealer immediately.  While this fault didn't prevent her from driving the car home (and ultimately cleared itself), it did have another affect.  As a result of the fault we opted not to drive the ActiveE to work on Friday out of fear, even though our flight out wasn’t until after 6 PM that day.  The last thing that we wanted to deal with on a day where we absolutely had to be somewhere at a certain time was a debilitating malfunction.  Welcome to the world of 'fault anxiety'. 

Since this is a field trial where BMW is working out the ‘bugs’ in preparation for the i3, these bugs are much more prevalent than would be the case for an actual production vehicle.  And now that it’s almost three months since the first ActiveE was delivered, a few bugs are becoming well known.  One of them is a drive train malfunction that could result in the vehicle being easily restarted, taking up to an hour to reset and be restarted, or worse, requiring a tow back to the dealer for resetting.

Clearly we didn’t want to deal with the stress of such a malfunction on a day that we were flying somewhere.  Fast-forward to this week, and the ‘fault anxiety' struck again.  I had meetings yesterday that I absolutely had to attend.  Guess what?  I drove the ICE, even though the meetings were well within the ActiveE's range.  While the i3 should have none of these issues when it is released, participating in a field trial where anything can happen will make you adjust your behaviors.  And for us that means dealing with ‘fault anxiety' until these bugs are exterminated by the good folks at BMW.

Such is the life of an Electronaut - until I'm confident that a fix has been implemented, sadly we won't be driving the ActiveE on 'critical' trips.