MINI-E: Showing Off on Earth Day

During the past 22 months with #250 I've had a lot of opportunities to talk about the MINI-E to friends, strangers, the press and even display the car at "Green" events. I try to bring the car to all the events that ask me to come, as I really think I am obligated to do what I can to help promote electric cars since I was one of the lucky few that was selected to be in the MINI-E program. Unfortunately some are just too far away or on days that I just cannot miss work. I actually like bringing the car to these events and talking to people there. They have all kinds of questions about EV's and I definitely have a audience that is interested in electric vehicles and would be the target market for EV manufacturers.

With Earth Day celebrations approaching, I have been asked to bring the car to places that I just cannot go, like Massachusetts and even Maryland. While it may be physically possible for me to find places to charge along the way, it would just take too much time to make the trip reasonable. So if anyone is organizing an Earth Day event in North or Central New Jersey or even New York City and would like a MINI-E there on display, send me a message and perhaps I can bring #250 along and show her off!

#250 at a Green Transportation Expo in Florham Park, NJ last fall

Back From The Bay Area Green Drive Expo

Picture of me and #250 on the Jumbotron at The Green Drive Expo

About two months ago I was asked by Brad Berman of PluginCars.com if I would like to sit on a panel of experienced electric car drivers to talk about living with an electric car and answer questions about the MINI-E and BMW's electric future. Brad was putting together the Bay Area Green Drive Expo and wanted one of the event programs to be three experienced EV owners for a Q & A session. I agreed to participate and the event was last Saturday, October 8th at the Craneway pavilion in Richmond, CA.

The event went really well. There were about 3,000 visitors and I got a chance to talk to some long time EV advocates like Chelsea Sexton (Who Killed The Electric Car) and Marc Geller, one of the founders of Plug In America. The two other panelists with me were Darell Dicky and Earl Cox. Darell has a RAV 4 EV and Earl has a Tesla Roadster. Both of them leased an EV-1 when they were available(Before GM took them all back and crushed them) and are fountains of information about electric cars. Darell, Earl and I are all frequent posters on Plugincars.com so I have communicated with them online, but had never met them before the event. It was nice to finally meet some of the people that I have been messaging online for a while now. Being on the East Coast I don't always get to meet many of the hard core EV advocates since many of them live in California where electric cars like the EV-1, the RAV 4 were available for a while. 

I really had a good time. I talked with so many people about the MINI-E, the BMW ActiveE and also the 2013 BMW Megacity vehicle. BMW was not present so I felt like the defacto representative. There were people there that were really interested in BMW's plans for electric mobility. I handed out printed cards that had ActiveE information on them and directed them to BMW's website and Project i Facebook page for information. There was a Nissan LEAF there, as well as two Tesla Roadsters, a Ford Focus EV, a Think City, a plug in Prius, a Mitsubishi iMiev, a Smart car, about a dozen professional conversions, electric motorcycles and electric assist bicycles. Chelsea Sexton was the keynote speaker, Toyota national manager of advanced technology Ed LaRocque gave a speech as did Gil Portalatin of Ford hybrid systems. There were test drives in the parking lot and all of the sponsors and speakers got together for a nice dinner after the event. 

It was really a great expo. Marc Geller even drove me back to my hotel from dinner in his RAV 4 EV. I had never driven in one before so that was a pretty cool experience. For me the best part was getting to personally meet all the people that I have only communicated with by email for the past few years. Thank you Brad for extending the offer to me to be a part of it all.

UPDATE: Someone posted a video of Marc, Darell, Earl and me on Youtube. This was recorded right after we were on stage for our Q & A session. Below is the link to the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8QsoUMxQbU&feature=player_embedded

MINI-E #250 Shows off at Green Transportation Expo

 

 I was asked to bring the car to a Green Transportation Expo in Florham Park last week. Fortunately, I pass through Florham Park on my way to work so it wasn't much of an inconvenience at all and I agreed. It was held in the parking lot of Pershing, LLC and there were about 15 other cars there. My MINI-E was the only pure electric so it got lots of attention and I was answering questions about it the whole time I was there. Most everyone really liked it and a few even knew about it. 

I even spoke to one of the organizers and he had told me that they were looking into installing charging stations in their parking lot for their employees. As you can imagine I encouraged him to do so and even offered some ideas and told him I can help him get in contact with the companies that make the EVSE's if he needed help. It's really great to hear employers getting on board with the EV movement. Workplace charging will play a big role in the mass deployment of electric vehicles. My personal experience of living with an EV was definitely improved when I installed a charger at my workplace. 

I talked about BMW's future EV plans including the ActiveE and Megacity vehicle and there was a lot of interest in those cars also. The day went well, there were a few hundred attendees and I'm sure more than a few of them went home with a different outlook on electric cars after I talked to them for a while.

Closing in on 40,000 Zero Emission Miles

I looked down at my odometer today and realized that I am closing in on 40,000 miles on my MINI-E. I suspect I'll get there in a couple weeks, right around the time I pass 15 months with the car. I drive a lot more than the average American does, partly because I live about 32 miles from my job and partly because owning a restaurant means frequent trips during the day to get supplies, visit off-site catering jobs and sometimes even deliver food myself.

The time has gone by very quickly and I have enjoyed the car much more than I ever thought I would. I've met so many interesting people along the way, most total strangers that stop and ask me about the car. Many of which tell me they are interested in the same things I am; energy independence, national security and the environmental benefits of electric cars. I have also met a whole legion of electric car enthusiasts online, many of which have found me through this blog, and others I have met from electric car websites like PlugInCars.com, a site that I occasionally write articles for. In fact, the editor of the site, Brad Berman, recently asked me to attend the Bay Area Green Drive Expo in October to sit on a panel of experienced electric car owners and answer questions from the audience, which I accepted.

It's hard to simply describe the great feeling of driving a zero emission vehicle, you have to experience it. The good news is that soon many others will get the opportunity with electric cars like the Chevy volt and the Nissan LEAF both going on sale in three months, followed by the all electric Ford Focus by mid 2011. I really think the public is going to love these cars, and I'm really thankful I have had the chance to experience it before most others have.

One thing that's cool to think about is there is about 2,200 gallons of gasoline that I didn't have to buy, currently sitting in an underground storage tank at the Lukoil gas station in Morristown that I used to go to. That gas would have been burned in my Toyota the past fourteen plus months if I wasn't in the MINI-E program.

Some other facts at 40,000 miles:

I didn't have to purchase 2,200 gallons of gasoline (My Toyota Tacoma gets 18mpg)
At $2.65/gal that's about $5,800. Compared to the roughly $1,800 in electric I've spent to charge up which is a $4,000 fuel savings. Even with a solar PV system, the electricity still "costs" me money because I could have sold it back to the utility at the current rate if I didn't use it to charge my car.

I didn't have to get ten oil changes, a savings of about $500 and I didn't generate 60 quarts of used motor oil that needs to be recycled.

I didn't have to stop for gas about 125 times. That would have added up to over 12 hours of wasted time sitting in my car at the pump. It takes me all of 5 seconds to plug my car in when I get home at night and I'm sleeping while it charges.
I would be close to needing a full tune up. Plugs, filters, belts, etc. All of which aren't necessary with an EV. That's one of the great things with electric cars, there are so few moving parts that can wear out, making the long term maintenance very low. Of course you still have the one big expense of a replacement battery pack that will probably come at around 120-140,000 miles. It's really not possible to predict what that will cost because the price of the Lithium Ion batteries are dropping all the time as more and more companies are making them plus the technology constantly improves. That being said, the money you will have saved in fuel and maintenance will more than cover the cost of the replacement battery pack.

Oh yeah, and since I didn't have to buy any "black gold" to power my car, none of my money left our local economy and went into the pockets of some radical foreign regime that's a member of OPEC. I think I like that fact the most.

MINI-E stars at the Green Transportation Expo

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a representative from Pershing LLC, a BNY Mellon company and asked if I could come to their Green Transportation Expo in Jersey City to display the MINI-E and talk to people there about the car and my experiences driving it. I agreed and headed out to the event early this morning. 

The Expo was held on the top floor of a parking deck in Jersey City, NJ very close to the Hudson River. Other than the fact that it was a very windy day which caused havoc for the tents and tables set up there, everything went well.

There were about 20 vehicles there, mostly hybrids but there was also a natural gas Honda Civic and a hydrogen fuel cell Chevy Equinox. The MINI-E was the only pure electric car there(a Tesla that had committed had to cancel) so it generated a lot of interest. In fact when the Mayor of Jersey City came(with the press in tow) the first car he walked over to was the MINI-E and he and I had a nice conversation about it as the cameras snapped pictures and a local television crew filmed. I was later asked by the TV crew to stand in front of the car and talk about it and the Trial Lease program I am participating in.

The highlights of the day for me were talking to the Clipper Creek representative Michael Paritee, about his products( the MINI-E uses Clipper Creek charge stations) and the possibility of converting them to use the new industry standard SAE j1772 plug.   The picture above is the j1772 plug attached to a Clipper Creek CS-40 charge station, the same one I have at my home to charge the MINI-E, except is has a plug specific to the MINI-E. All future electric cars in the US will use the j1772 plug so all public charging stations will have this plug. I also has a good time arguing with the Chevrolet representative who was there to show the Hydrogen Fuel cell Equinox. He was telling people that GM will have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in their showrooms for sale within a couple of years. I told him he was nuts and that either he is uninformed or flat out lying. Hydrogen as a fuel may sound great (It only emits water as exhaust), but realistically we are decades away from being able to use it as a fuel for transportation, it's just too expensive to make, compress, transport and distribute. Plus, it takes more energy to make it than you eventually get from it. If you just use the electricity that it takes to make the hydrogen to charge a battery for an EV, you eliminate the whole process necessary to create hydrogen, plus there is already an electric infrastructure and it would take billions of dollars to build out a national hydrogen supply chain. When anyone suggests to me that Hydrogen is the ultimate fuel, I refer them to this informative article on Hydrogen. It's a long article, but full of facts that point to hydrogen being nothing more than a red herring to keep up addicted to oil for as long as possible.