Okay, so this baggage test wasn’t taken literally by us long term 2022 BMW 330e. For some reason, John Snyder doesn’t want to spend 34 hours driving 2,350 miles to Oregon so I can throw some bags in. dip into the mixture The 3 Series then turned around and drove back. I offered him some donuts and a six pack of something delicious, but “Ah, no, thanks,” he said. All right, let’s do it that way.
Thankfully, I checked my luggage 330e back in April 2021. Specifically, I compared it to the regular 3 Series for the purpose of demonstrating how much space you lose when stuffing a bunch the battery under part of the cargo floor.
M340i on the left and 330e on the right. The floor between the wheels is clearly higher in the plug-in hybrid.
But yeah, what’s going on with the floor at 330e?
Floor slabs bend and lower to increase space or create a conventional flat floor. It’s easy to do this and the control panel is well designed.
If anything, it looks like the lower position could be a bit lower than that of the M340i. Only slightly, though, and in no way around the fact that this gives the plug-in hybrid a distinct disadvantage.
About luggage. As with every baggage check, I use two medium roller suitcases that need to be checked in at the airport (26 inches long, 16 wide, 11 deep), two on-board roll-on suitcases that only fit the top (24L x 15W x 10D) and one roll on smaller ships that fit easily (23L x 15W x 10D). I also included my wife’s favorite overnight bag just to spruce things up a bit (21L x 12W x 12D).
First, the odd floor makes loading luggage difficult, especially with the hill in the middle. It took Tetris several times to find my maximum number of bags.
So, what is the difference? The M340i can fit the 5 biggest bags, but the smallest (fancy) bag has to stay behind. The 330e can fit 5 of the smallest bags, including the fancy one, but the largest bag has to stay in the back. Each person still has room for a large shopping bag and other unrelated items.
On paper, the 330e’s trunk has 4 cubic feet less space than the gas-only 3 Series. That test with this test. Officially, its volume is 13.2 cubic feet, but as we have seen many times, BMW car had to use a different measurement method than the rest of the industry because its trunk volume figures were consistently higher than what the space itself suggested.
In fact, the 330e trunk looks comparable to 10.9 cubic feet trunk in Cadillac CT4.
