Looking back on an exciting new year
Nowadays, around the turn of the year, it is no longer all that exciting for the car industry and business drivers in the area of addition. That was about 8 or 9 years ago, for example, with the arrival of the BMW 330e iPerformance. The first plug-in hybrid 3 Series. How did that work again?
Ah yes, the addition. Nowadays you don’t hear much about it, but certainly in the last decade it was regularly front page news in the car world. Many an importer or dealer sometimes wakes up drenched after a bad dream about the caprices of a capricious taxman, who seemingly carelessly linked addition percentages to emission figures. If a new car fell within the right frameworks, business drivers in the Netherlands would queue up for it, while a mere gram of extra meant zero attention.
330e iPerformance, first plug-in hybrid 3 Series
The BMW 330e iPerformance introduced in the autumn of 2015, the brand’s second plug-in hybrid after the i8, is a good example of this scenario. Its official emissions of 44 g/km were low enough in 2015 for only a 7 percent addition, which, given the starting price of initially €43,990, was not a crazy deal. The importer only had great difficulty getting enough cars and also registering them; it would not exceed forty until the turn of the year.
Doubling addition after 31 December
At the crack of New Year’s Day, when the headache after all the champagne and thousand bangers already made itself felt, the addition for all subsequent plug-in BMWs had already more than doubled. And so automatically the impact of the company car on the household budget. That immediately made it much less obvious to blindly choose the 330e because it was simply an economical plug-in hybrid.
Nicer than 318i with 25 percent addition
Anyway, with this BMW with 14 percent addition, you were still significantly cheaper than if you opted for an entry-level 318i of €34,500 at the beginning of 2016, because you had to add 25 percent for that. In addition, the 330e was by far the nicer car; he could even count himself among the fastest members of the 3-series. While the 318i from the F30 generation onwards could offer no more than a 1.5-litre three-cylinder turbocharged engine producing 136 hp, the 330e iPerformance boasted a two-litre four-cylinder with two turbos and of course electric auxiliaries, good for 252 hp combined. In 2018, the addition went to 22 percent and the 330e silently disappeared from the range halfway through the year.
BMW drivers who were already able to drive their new 330e in 2015, just like AutoWeek, had the first for this model; the international press launch would not take place until the spring of 2016.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl