 Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
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Mini E
Richmond Hill, Ontario – My Mini was fuelling up when I arrived at BMW’s head office for a test drive. Eager to be on my way, I performed the rest of the operation myself: I unplugged it and neatly wrapped up the cord.
My ride was the Mini E, an all-electric version of the iconic British vehicle. It’s experimental, but it’s not a one-off concept; it was one of 450 that were leased to customers in New York, New Jersey and California to use as regular cars, providing feedback to BMW on the experience. The project is now wrapping up. This particular tester had come off a lease in New Jersey, and had almost 18,000 kilometres on the clock.
No more Mini E models are planned, as the little coupe has fulfilled its duties as part of a multi-stage program. Next up will be the Concept ActiveE, initially shown at last January’s Detroit Auto Show, based on a 1 Series coupe. It will also go into limited use, but will pave the way for the MegaCity, an all-electric urban vehicle scheduled to arrive in 2013 as a regular model in the BMW line-up. Unlike the Mini E and ActiveE, the MegaCity is penned from scratch, and won’t simply be an electric version of any existing model. Since weight is the enemy in an electric vehicle, it will also make extensive use of carbon fibre, which will be the next huge step in BMW’s electric strategy.
  Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
The company has a long history of experimenting with electric and hybrid vehicles, beginning in 1972 with a model that had several lead-acid batteries stuffed under its hood. While minor improvements are always ongoing, automakers pretty much nailed the electric car back in the earliest days of self-propelled vehicles, when these simple-to-use cars outnumbered the cantankerous, hard-to-start gasoline versions. The major stumbling block has always been the batteries, which have never kept pace. It has only been in the last few years, with the introduction of lithium-ion cells, that electric cars finally show promise as viable vehicles.
The Mini E uses them, stacked between the front seats and a small rear cargo area, making the car strictly a two-seater. On the ActiveE and MegaCity, they’ll be sandwiched under the floor, allowing four-passenger seating and a trunk. The Mini E also uses “Super Caps,” special capacitors that store extra energy and release it when a blast of power is required, such as on hard acceleration.
Other than the carpeted riser behind the seat, lack of a tailpipe, and a power indicator in place of a tachometer, the Mini E wouldn’t look any different than a conventional model if its name wasn’t plastered across its doors. Starting it is the same as with gasoline – insert the key and push the start button – except that only the gauges come alive. The shift lever looks and works the same as a conventional automatic one; according to BMW, it’s attached to a manual transmission with a single fixed gear powered by the electric motor. Like a regular stick-shift vehicle, the car will roll backwards on a hill if you take your foot off the brake.
  Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
If your opinion of electric cars is that they’re glorified golf carts, that idea goes out the window the moment you press the accelerator. It’s rated at 201 horsepower, more than the 181 horses in the turbocharged Cooper S. The Cooper S makes 177 lb-ft of torque to the Mini E’s 162 lb-ft, but where a gasoline engine has to rev up to reach its maximum torque, an electric motor provides full twist the moment it starts to spin. At 1,660 kg, the Mini E has an additional 55 kilos over the automatic-equipped Cooper S, and so its acceleration times are slower: zero to 100 km/h takes 7.2 seconds with gasoline, and 8.5 seconds with battery. Still, 8.5 seconds is certainly no golf cart, and on an empty stretch of highway, I tapped the Mini E up to a speed I won’t reveal, except to say that it would have gotten me into some serious trouble had the local lawmakers been watching. Battery-powered cars still have major hurdles, but from the driving perspective, they are viable vehicles.
 Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
In addition to charging via an electrical outlet, the Mini E feeds a bit of power back into its batteries through regenerative braking. In simplest terms, this involves the electric motor running backwards, slowing the wheels and acting as a generator to feed power back into storage (the car also has conventional friction brakes on all wheels, of course). Take your foot off the accelerator, and the Mini E pushes you forward in the seat; it slows down so quickly that the brake lights illuminate to warn drivers behind you. The car doesn’t coast, and until I got used to it, I found I was stopping several car lengths short of red lights. It’s possible to alleviate the sharp deceleration by feathering the accelerator, but that also reduces the effectiveness of the regenerative system. I expect the ActiveE to improve on this, and the MegaCity to take it even further – part of the reason why new technologies take so much time and money to bring to market.
The heavy batteries also pack more weight into the rear end; it feels like driving a pickup truck with a load in the box. The regular Mini already suffers from torque-steer, and with all that mass in the back, the Mini E’s front end is squirmy and light on acceleration. With its batteries under the floor and better balanced front-to-back, along with its rear-wheel drive, the ActiveE should be a considerable improvement.
 Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
Even so, the Mini E is fun to drive. I know the novelty factor is at least partly responsible for that, but the majority of U.S. lessees also listed enjoyable driving as part of the experience. There’s no engine sound, but there’s still the same amount of road noise, and so there isn’t the feeling of isolated driving that you might anticipate from an electric car.
Of course, the big issue is getting power back into the batteries once they’re empty. The company claims a range of 160 to 190 kilometres on a charge. I was out for a little over an hour, most of the time with my foot in the oil pan, if the car had had one, which ultimately drained the battery to about 70 per cent of its full charge. A few days earlier, a BMW employee had taken the car home for the night, but a malfunctioning plug in her garage meant she couldn’t recharge it. She made the round trip, approximately 150 kilometres in mostly highway driving, with 24 per cent of the battery’s power still intact.
Charging the Mini E from complete drain takes 24 hours on a 110-volt charger, which is how BMW was doing it. On a 240-volt fast charger, it takes between three and five hours, but installing one in the company’s new, environmentally-friendly LEED-certified building would have required several permits, which wasn’t done since the Mini E will only be staying for a couple of weeks. “Fuelling” the car is dead simple: open the filler door and remove the cap, as you would if filling with gasoline, and then push the charger end into the car’s plug receptacle.
 Mini E electric car. Click image to enlarge |
Unlike a hybrid, or an extended-range vehicle such as the Chevrolet Volt, the Mini E driver is out of luck if he or she runs out of power on the road. Improved batteries and lighter-weight vehicle structures will help improve the range, but until a network of quick-charging stations becomes the norm, electric vehicles will undoubtedly find most of their audience within cities, with people who generally travel regular routes and seldom rack up extended trips – hence, the upcoming MegaCity’s name.
“It’s not much different than when gasoline cars came out, and gas stations didn’t exist,” said Rob Dexter, corporate communications specialist of product and technology for BMW Canada. “People would say, ‘You’re going to put a big tank of volatile fuel outside on the corner? You’re nuts!’ But now, of course, you can’t go anywhere without being in range of a gas station. They had to start somewhere. That’s where electric cars are now. There will be early adopters, but eventually there will be a grid. It may take twenty years, but one day we’ll have young people saying, ‘You mean there was a time when you had to put fuel in a car?’ A big chunk of BMW’s future is electric.”
