What do points mean? Altogether now... PRIZES! Or in this case credit towards charging your car. You see, BMW is introducing a new 'BMW Points' programme, which seeks to reward those who drive one of the Munich firm's plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) with points for every electric-only kilometre that they drive.
Encouraging electric-only driving
Obviously, driving more km on electric power is better, overall, for the environment and there has been some controversy in recent months over people buying plug-in hybrids and not actually plugging them in much. So, BMW will offer drivers two points for every 1.6km driven on electric power (or per mile if you're being old-school about it) and four points for every 1.6km driven on electric power in an 'eDrive' zone.
What's an eDrive zone?
It's a zone, usually in a town or city, defined by BMW as an area in which you really ought to be under electric power. They're not legislated zones, just BMW's suggestion, but you can read between the lines that the car maker reckons that these will soon be legislated EV-only zones. BMW's plug-in hybrid line-up has been engineered to switch to EV-only mode (assuming there's enough charge in the battery) as they cross into an eDrive zone. Put a destination into the navigation, and the car will automatically save enough battery power as you drive to be in zero-emissions mode in any eDrive zones that you pass through.
So, what do you get for your points? Well, once you've collected 3,200 points, you get a voucher that will pay for some public charging, and a bigger voucher when you hit 7,500 points, and again at 14,000 points. Want to rack up those points quickly? Then charge your car on a BMW Charging network charger (there are more than 500,000 around the world) and you'll get 20 bonus points for a 15-minute charge, and 500 points for 20 such charge-ups in a month.
Dublin and Limerick are the first Irish eDrive zones
BMW already awards points to customers in Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands, and now the programme is being rolled out to the UK and Ireland. Dublin and Limerick have already been allocated as eDrive zones, along with London and Birmingham in the UK. Joining those locations will be Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast, Liverpool, Bath and Manchester.
If you're driving a BMW 330e, 530e, 545e, 745e, X3 xDrive30e, or X5 xDrive45e, fitted with the BMW Operating System 7.0, you just need to register via the BMW smartphone app and your EV mileage will be logged automatically.