Mini E electric car

 

I suppose we should get straight to the point. The Mini E that you see in the pictures this morning is absolutely brilliant.

Unlike the stupid Toyota Prius, which tries to win the environmental argument by wading into battle with two power sources, the Mini is propelled entirely by its batteries. And unlike the idiotic Reva G-Wiz, it doesn’t look as though it was made from bog seats as part of a sixth-form project. It looks like a car.

So you don’t feel like a pious, mealy-mouthed sandal enthusiast as you drive about. Of course, it doesn’t feel like “a car” to drive. It feels different, odd, unusual. And in some ways, dare I say it, better. You get in, push the key into the slot, same as you do in a normal Mini, press the starter button, same as you do in a normal Mini, and then swear a little bit under your breath, same as you do in a normal Mini, because it starts telling you to put your seatbelt on.

Other than the beeping nanny, though, there is no noise. You have started the motor but nothing, at least nothing audible, has happened. Warily, then, you put the one-speed gearbox into drive, press the accelerator and off you go. Then, when you get onto the open road, you press it some more and, boy, you really move. This is not just fast for an electric car; it is fast, full stop. The top speed may be limited to 95mph but 0-62 is dealt with in just 8.5 seconds. It feels faster because normally the experience is accompanied by sound. In the Mini E, it isn’t. And soundless speed doesn’t compute in our heads. It’s the stuff of nightmares. It’s the sound of falling from a tall building. I liked it a lot.

The reason the Mini is so fast is simple. Electric motors produce a huge amount of torque, immediately, and at a constant level. There are no peaks and troughs like you get from internal combustion. Just 162 torques of grunt from the get-go. And 150kW of power. That equates to 201bhp. And that’s 10% more than you get from a Cooper S.

To cope with the extraordinary power, the E is indeed fitted with Cooper S suspension, which, coupled to the wheel-at-each-corner layout, means you can be an eco-warrior while indulging in a spot of liftoff oversteer. Brakes? I don’t know. I never used them. This is because when you lift your foot from the throttle, the Mini uses the act of slowing down to trickle a bit of power back into the batteries. And that causes the car to slow dramatically. Coasting? It’s not in this thing’s vocabulary.

And here’s the really juicy bit. When you’ve finished clowning around, you don’t have to give BP a hundred quid for the privilege of doing it all over again. You just plug your Mini into the wall socket and, in exchange for £1.50, Southern Electric will pump the batteries into life again. Even if you charge it up during the day when electricity costs more, it’s still only four quid.

Now, of course, you may think that Tesla did all this ages ago. Well, I can’t be sure, because the first Tesla I tried ran low on battery power and, while it was being charged, lost its brakes. The second overheated. Whereas the Mini I tried worked perfectly. I suspect there’s a very good reason for this. Teslas are made by earnest young men on a mission to save the world. The Mini E is built by BMW. And call me old-fashioned but when it comes to making cars, serious German doctors of engineering tend to be better than a bunch of Californian surfer dudes who, like, you know, man, really kind of put the pelican first.

This, however, does not mean the Mini is perfect. The first, and biggest, problem is that you can’t buy one now or indeed ever. It’s just a test-bed, designed to see if electric cars are viable. The second is range. And this is where the makers of all electric cars fall flat on their faces. In short, they fib. They say that the machine they’ve made can do, say, 200 miles between trips to the plug, and maybe, on the right day, this might just be possible. But in the real world, with hills and other traffic, it isn’t. BMW says the Mini E has a range of 104 miles. But after just 60, my buttocks were puckered by news of impending doom from the range-ometer. I was nervous because I really didn’t want to knock on someone’s door and ask if I could buy some of their electricity. Especially as a charge takes 4½ hours. Nobody wants an eco-head in their house for that long.

Then there’s the problem of practicality. To make the Mini E work like a petrol car, it has 5,088 lithium-ion batteries — the same sort you find in a laptop. Fitting this lot in, and the fans needed to keep them cool, means that the Mini E has no back seat and not much in the way of a boot. And it’s not just space that’s lost, either. The battery pack weighs 260kg, which means a huge amount of the power is used just to move the batteries around.

You may think that soon the situation will improve as the pressure mounts on the battery industry and the car makers to come up trumps. But don’t hold your breath. Normally, huge pressure solves everything. When we needed long-range planes in the war to bridge the Atlantic air gap and nail the U-boats, we had them in months. And then, just months after that, the Germans had developed a system that kept their subs underwater. Man can move fast when the chips are down.

And because we are not moving fast on battery technology, because there has been no chemical breakthrough, we have to reason that the nut can’t be cracked.

BMW talks only about significant progress in the coming years. General Motors has had to build a petrol engine into its “electric” car, the Vauxhall Ampera, to give it enough range. There are other issues, too. While the motor under the Mini’s bonnet has only one moving part and should therefore be reliable, the power pack in the back will one day need replacing.

Think about that. It is extremely expensive to replace the two lithium-ion batteries in your laptop when they become doggy and tired, so  can you imagine how much it would cost to buy 5,000 of the damn things? And that’s before we get to the bigger question: is it really right to call an electric car a “zero-emissions car” when the electricity used to charge it up comes from a power station? Then there’s the biggest question of all. In Britain there is a serious worry that we simply aren’t making enough electricity to cope with current demands. So what happens when 28m motorists get home at night and expect to be able to charge their cars? The system simply will not be able to cope.

And in case you were thinking of installing a domestic windmill at your house to provide clean, free energy, consider this. Charging your Mini from such a thing would take 600 hours. That’s 25 days.

The truth of the matter, then, is simple. The Mini E sits out there as a shining example of something that can’t be achieved. A glimpse into a future that won’t happen. The spearhead of an attack that will never come.