Mini Cooper goes all-electric with the Mini E

The Mini Cooper has been an icon of British style and appeared in pop art and movies like the Italian Job since the 1960’s. Now the car maker is taking a green turn to challenge the likes of the Prius and Chevy’s Volt with the all-electric Mini E.

Mini admits on their web site that there are inherit problems with the launch or testing of an electric car. Their “considerable hurdles” include limited driving range, expensive batteries, charging times, and the small number of existing charging stations.

Instead of rushing to put an electric car on the market, they are giving it a go in a different way with “a limited field trial” for their electric edition. They reached out to residents of metropolitan Los Angeles and New York to find eager adopters for the electric Mini E. Participants would pay $850 a month to lease the car for one year and give feedback to the company. Mini would cover any maintenance issues and install a charger in their home. They had 450 open slots for the field trial and 1,800 applicants.

The Mini E isn’t quite what the public is used to in a standard Mini because of the 600 pound battery. Namely, the car can only seat two people and doesn’t handle quite as well as its gas powered siblings. The battery will power the car for about 100 miles but can be impacted by cold weather or use of the heater or air conditioning. The car does have some pep with a top speed of 95 mph, even beating a Prius in an impromptu drag race.

Like any other experiment, Mini and parent company BMW Group ran into some problems. Mini offered their “pioneers” a free charging station at their home that could power up the car in three to five hours on a 220-volt outlet. Some had to upgrade their home’s wiring out of their own pocket while others had to wrangle with local officials that didn’t have a lot of experience with similar devices. Even if they successfully installed the setup, Underwriters Laboratories Inc. hadn’t approved the charging cable that BMW had sent over from Europe. Without the cable and upgraded outlet the charge time for the Mini E runs about twenty four hours.

Even though they had some problems, Mini E participants soldiered on with the test. They came together via Facebook to organize local meetings and chatted about topics like how the Mini E could impact their tax returns. There’s also talk of a iPhone app that would record the car’s charging history.

The company plans on testing the Mini E in the UK and Germany in the near future. Hopefully the infrastructure will follow.