Check it out:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/bmw-mini-e

 

Wow sad. I've seen similar bad reviews of this great car.
The astonishing $850 per month lease price continues to make plug-in cars look too expensive to the press and the public. BMW's overly complicated charger installs make electric cars look too costly and complicated to own.
I'm starting to wonder if BMW wants the MINI-E to look that way because they don't really want the field test to go well so they can tell CARB they don't have a market for plug-in EVs. Just like GM did with the EV1 even though there were thousands of people on waiting list to try to get one.
GM still says they couldn't SELL any EV1s even though they were LEASE only. They never were for-sale! I'm sure BMW will say that the cars cost a lot to make and that's why the $850. But if it were a 3 or 5 year lease, the monthly would come way down. Also, that is the same thing that GM said about the EV1. They never offer that if they made tens of thousands of them the economy of scale would bring the cost per unit way down.
I'm sad to see that the MINI-E program is miming the EV1 program.
I hope at the end of the day the the car, the MINI-E and it's wonderful technology will win the day. Everybody needs to drive this car and see for themselves!

 

I love driving the mini e. As a mini e pioneer, I think a positive attitude is the most important attribute to have.

After my lease is up I am going to buy another electric car.

 

I didn't think the article was that negative. Just seemed like what I would expect from someone approaching it from an average driver's perspective, not a MINI fanatic nor a green energy cheerleader.

It is early days for electric cars. This is, after all, a test car. I expect that BMW based the $850/month lease on what they thought the market would bear, not what they would ultimately sell electric cars for. So, I think it is too early to spend too much time analyzing how the cost will effect the market.

There are those who think that lithium-ion batteries will not be the widely used energy storage system for electric cars. Instead, they believe hydrogen will be used. A unit in your garage would convert water to hydrogen and oxygen. You would fill your car with the hydrogen and convert it to electricity while driving. It would be much like having batteries, but you could also fill up quickly at a hydrogen station. Time will tell what works out the best.

I suspect it will be the government mandates that determine whether electric cars become common. Without such mandates, car companies will stick with the technology they know. They will just keep refining infernal-combustion engines until forced to do otherwise.

 

Yes, car companies seem to need government mandates to do the right thing. Like Seat-belts, airbags, catalytic convertors, etc. . . . all mandated.
Of course this is not the early days of electric cars. In 1997 I drove the GM EV1 for 3 years and put 32,000 miles on that car driving it everyday until GM took it away and crushed it. See: "Who Killed the Electric Car".
Also hydrogen is a myth pushed by the oil companies that want to sell you something. It takes a lot of electricity to MAKE hydrogen and a lot of water too. It's more cost effective to just use the electricity to charge you cars battery. You can travel 4-5 times to distance with the same energy in a battery car than hydrogen. HFC cars don't make economic sense and are not close to being as ready as BEV are now and were 15 years ago.

 

Let's face it, THIS IS A TEST CAR! The electric technology has been inserted into an off-the-shelf MIMI Cooper that is too heavy, too slow, and way too expensive to be thought of as a production vehicle. SO WHAT? We pioneers are going to put the MINI E into real life use and provide BMW, and presumably other manufacturers, with the data and feedback to create a real production electric vehicle that is light, fast, and affordable to what is left of the middle class.

 

Well said Juiced!

 

In the era of the EV1, hydrogen looked like a lost cause. However, that may not be the case any more. An MIT professor seems to have come up with methods that look much more promising.