Just passed 30,000 miles, almost 30 months since we purchased the i-MiEV.
The car continues to suit our lifestyle amazingly-well and is used for virtually all of our local driving, with our normal single-charge maximum being a 70-mile round trip to/from SFO (airport). My wife loves 'her' i-MiEV, and the Corbin Sparrow EVs serve as my daily-drivers. The remaining Gen1 Honda Insight (the other one was recently totalled when a drunk driver ran into it) is our rarely-used long-distance car, with the ICE Isuzu Trooper reserved for occasional towing. The other ICE cars have been essentially mothballed.
My i-MiEV driving style has changed over the years: whereas at the outset I was a dedicated hypermiler, after my Insight accident (rear-ended while in the right lane) I've now reverted to my old leadfoot driving habits and only hypermile when occasionally needing the range. Wife is a featherfoot, which must be very confusing for our RR computer. Speaking of which, I recently took a longer trip with some friends in their Leaf and our RR algorithm with its 15-mile moving average seems to me to be far less susceptible to short-distance variations than the Leaf's - significantly better, from my perspective.
I now rarely use ECO mode, use B-N for both city and mountain driving, and D-N for the highways. I will definitely be the first to wear out the i-MiEV shift mechanism, as I still pop the car into N wherever possible. Love the i-MiEV's ability to manually control regen.
I've also altered my charging regimen. In winter I let the car slowly charge on L1 overnight and time the charge using the Remote so it stops at around 14 bars just before the car is needed in the morning. In summer, I now let the car cool off overnight and plug it into L2 in the early morning, with a mechanical timer shutting off at around 14 bars. Not to worry, the car gets a full balancing charge at least once every couple of weeks.
The only maintenance in these 30,000 miles is a new set of tires and a cabin air filter (in hindsight, I should merely have pulled out the filter and blown it clean). The cracked windshield (rock kicked up off the roadway by a MBZ) was replaced with insurance covering most of the cost. The only failure in these 30,000 miles was a burned-out dome light. Brake wear has been negligible, there have been no leaks, and no fluid additions have been required at all (windshield washer maybe touched once a year so the original fluid is still in there - it has barely rained here).
The car's range took a big hit about the time I switched over to the Yokohama AVID ENVigor tires - still uncertain as to the cause-effect relationship and the only way to find out is to put the OEM Dunlop Enasaves back on. Whereas we were getting full-charge RRs in the 80's and 90's for the first two years, they're now in the 60's and 70's - but that can also be easily explained by the change in my driving style, and I drive the car enough times during the week to negate my wife's featherfooting. We've never seen turtle and almost never go below two bars.
I regret not having bought an i-MiEV with CHAdeMO, as local L2 public charging stations are often PHEV'd. I have the EVSEUpgraded Mitsu EVSE and its programmable 120v/240v current selection capability, and I use it maybe a couple of times a month. Distant friends have been conditioned to routinely expect me to plug into their garage dryer outlets - a good bottle of wine works wonders.
Our 'fuel' cost has been negligible, as I generate excess Solar$$ annually with our 6.6kW photovoltaics. We only have a monthly home grid-tie service charge that is under $5 with 'smart' Time-Of-Use metering for our all-electric house with no aircon but power-hungry swimming pool pumps. For the first 8000 miles of ownership I meticulously recorded our i-MiEV's wall-to-wheels energy consumption and it averaged 4.2miles/kWh.
The many advantages of the car that we keep spouting off (good manual control over regen, capaciousness and flat rear floor with the seats down, tight turning radius, visibility, easy ingress/egress, etc.) continue making this car an incredibly useful urban vehicle. I swear at Consumer Reports for their incredibly biased and simply unfair review of this car, which I'm sadly finding out has caused a lot of damage as all-too-often people interested in EVs cite this review to me.
About the only complaint I have with the car is the obtrusive headrests, and I only install them when I have passengers. The right-rear corner visibility is also poor when backing out of a diagonal parking space, but that seems to be true of all modern vehicles in response to rollover structural requirements. The only flaky item on the car is the Remote's intermittent operation with my SPX Power Xpress EVSE at 240v.
In summary, we continue enjoying this car and are so happy we sprang for it 2-1/2 years ago!
