km : Passing Lane

Would an electric drive system make the Mini Cooper lose its go-kart handling? We were unsure going into our first drive behind the wheel, partly because we kept thinking, “Well, aren’t some go-karts electric?” From there, our thoughts devolved: “Does this then mean we can drive the Mini E inside?”

To be honest, the whole fear of all electric cars driving with the excitement of a giant Roomba is seriously exaggerated. In a lot of ways, the Mini E drives like any other Mini. In other ways, it drives like nothing else, but we’ll get to that. Accelerating from a stop, the Mini E just feels like a hybrid that takes its electric side very seriously—there’s tons of instantaneous torque, and there’s no need to feather the throttle to stay in all EV-mode, because EV is all this Mini knows. Its sound isn’t unfamiliar, either. The hum of power driving the front wheels sounds quite a bit like a first-generation supercharged Cooper S, only without the clatter of internal combustion.
The Mini E weighs some 600 pounds more than a Cooper S, which you might suspect does diminish handling a bit. Not as much as you might think, though. The car still wears Mini’s tiny footprint with the wheels shoved out to the corners, so even with the added weight it still has good balance because the additional mass is all between the wheels. Between the motor up front and the batteries out back, the weight is evenly split, with the front axle holding up 1653 pounds to the rear’s 1576. Go hard into a corner and the Mini E tends to push more than a regular Cooper, but the motions are predictable and controllable with the Mini’s sharp responses.



What isn’t so controllable, and becomes a bigger problem going into corners, is the Mini E’s aggressive regenerative braking. It feels like the throttle pedal is attached to an anchor, and each time it is released, the anchor is too. It’ll slam you right up against the seatbelt—luckily, the car automatically illuminates the brake lights any time the energy re-gathering exceeds 0.3 g of slowing power. This is especially disconcerting when you intend to lift, but not brake, into a corner, as an unexpected weight transfer surges forward and you’re required to brush the throttle through the turn to keep the chassis balanced. Mini understands this issue, but apparently drivers of the current test fleet are split—some really enjoy the feature, while other think the regenerative braking is too intense. For the next generation of cars, the engineering team is toying with the idea of integrating a dial that varies the level of braking. With less aggressive regen braking, the Mini E’s “ideal” range of 156 miles would likely be impossible. In our vigorous 15-mile drive loop with the car, we managed to drain an indicated seven percent of the battery life.

We were able to sit down briefly with Richard Steinberg, Mini’s Electric Vehicle Development Manager, to chat about the Mini E’s success so far. The plusses and minuses I list above -- the act of actually driving the car -- is just the tip of the iceberg of Mini’s electric car development. The team has learned a lot from this first set of cars and hopes the second will be even more enjoyable to drive and, technology willing, will have a useable rear seat. The biggest hang-up with electric cars is, quite obviously, the infrastructure shortcomings.



This doesn’t just mean the lack of charging stations or the amount of time it takes to charge the batteries, though. A lot of it is the behind-the-scenes bureaucracy. To get the charging station installed in a customer’s house, there’s a never-ending battle for building permits, for getting inspectors to come out, and even convincing inspectors that are unfamiliar with the technology that the charging station is safe when properly installed. Even then, there are issues with the charging cords themselves. The early Mini Es were held up before delivery because the cords used to charge them weren’t UL approved (even they had been approved in Europe.) This was another loophole to get past, and the Society of Automotive Engineers is hard at work on getting one standard cord in place.

So far as we can tell, the Mini E as a car is almost ready for prime time, once battery costs come down and some of the drivability issues are sorted. But we wonder more about whether the US, with our many states and counties and cities with different standards and different intentions are ready to make electric cars a hoop-jumping-free purchase. That might take a bit longer than the actual car development.

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