Plugging In Beats Filling Up Any Day Of The Week

November 12th was my 17th month anniversary with MINI-E #250. I have driven it almost 45,000 miles and I am approaching my 800th recharge. I keep detailed records of every time I drive the car as well as every time I charge up so I know exactly how many times I have plugged in, and that would be 791 times so far.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? I often hear people say how they wouldn't want an electric car and one of the reasons is because it's so easy to drive to a gas station and fill up. When you do so, you're generally good for 300 to 400 miles of driving as opposed to only a hundred miles or so for an EV.

The thing is, it's really no work at all to plug in, and only people that have lived with an EV can honestly attest to that. When I arrive home at night, it takes less than ten seconds to walk over to my EVSE, grab the cable and plug in. The car charges while I'm sleeping, it's that easy. When you need gas, you have to drive to a station and wait for them to fill your car up before you can continue on your way. My other car, a Toyota Tacoma can go about 325 miles between fill ups so I would have had to fill up at least 140 times, and most likely would have done so about 150 times.

So what would I prefer to do?  Make 150 trips to the gas station or just pull into my garage like I always do every night anyway and take a few seconds to plug in my electric car? Continue to suck on the oil nipple that we have all been conditioned to believe that we need, or tell OPEC to shove their black gold up their a** and charge my electric car with clean renewable electricity that I make myself with my solar PV array.
Hmmm, let me think about that one for a while.........

Public Charging Stations: Necessity or Luxury?

What comes first the car or the public infrastructure? A 21st century version of the old chicken and egg conundrum.

I have read a lot of articles that have basically taken the stand that electric cars need a complex network of public charging stations, like gas stations before people will buy them because they will be afraid they will be left stranded by the roadside without any place to charge.

Honestly I don't know if these worries are genuine or just scare tactics by groups that do not want to see electric cars become the method of choice for our transportation. I suppose it is a combination of that and legitimate concern by people that have not had the opportunity to live with an electric car like those of us in the MINI-E program have.

Public charge points will definitely help the long term success of EV's, but to claim that they need to be in place before the public will buy EV's is just not true. The majority of EV charging will take place at the owners home, probably as much as 80%. The second most common charge point would be at the owners place of work. I believe many companies will agree to install chargers on their property if they have employees that will use them. It won't cost much to install them, there's even a government program now to offer free chargers to about 5,000 locations (I've already applied for my restaurants parking lot). Then there will be private enterprises like McDonalds, Walmart, Home Depot, etc that will take it upon themselves to install them in their parking lots. This makes all the sense in the world because not only can they charge a small fee to park and charge there, but then they have a captured customer while their car is charging. Every time one of my fellow MINI-E drivers stopped by Nauna's to use my charger they sat in the dining room and bought a meal. It's a win-win situation in every way.

What also needs to be noted is that although the cars take a few hours to charge, when someone uses a public charging station, they are more likely going to only need a quick charge to finish their travels and get home. The won't need to completely charge the car so they won't be waiting 3 or 4 hours in most circumstances. I can speak with authority on this topic unlike most journalists and "automotive experts" because I have lived with an electric car for 13 months now and have developed a network of friends that are also driving one and we frequently share stories and talk about the benefits and challenges we live with by driving an EV. Most everyone agrees that after their home charger, having a charge point at their place of work like I have would be the first place they would like to have one installed. Many say they don't even need a charger at work but would use it if it were available and even more say they would have rarely ever use a public charging station if they were available.

Personally I think that private enterprise will provide for most of the public charge points needed to begin to transition from gasoline powered cars to electrics. If municipalities added one or two in each public parking lot that would even be better, but this thought that we need to install them everywhere like gas stations is just not reality, and is only causing people that aren't sure if an EV would work for them to worry about it. I wish the auto manufacturers and the government would listen more to people that have actual experience with EV's. If they did they might realize that they could do more with less.

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.

Plugging In

Recently I was talking to a friend about the future of electric cars and he said he thinks one of the obstacles will be that people(he) wouldn't want to have to waste time plugging in the car all the time. He said it's so easy to just buy gas once a week and it takes so little time to do so. I quickly snapped back "you waste more time buying gas than I do plugging this thing in, I'll tell you that" He didn't believe me, but as they said in Cool Hand Luke "Some people you just can't reach".

So I thought I'd do a little test to see just how much time I spend plugging in. I know it's not long, but exactly how long I wasn't sure. So for the next few times I plugged the car in (and then unplugged) I timed myself.

Six seconds.

Yep, that's all it take to plug the car in and another 5 or 6 seconds to unplug. So basically I spent about 24 seconds a day plugging in and unplugging since I charge the car twice a day on most days, once at home and once at work. I'm not sitting there waiting for the car to charge, like you have to go when you're filling up with gasoline. I'm either sleeping or working while the lithium ion batteries are recharging. I then went to a gas station when I had some time and parked over on the side by the air pump and timed some of the cars that were filling up.

Seven minutes.

The average car took seven minutes from the time they pulled in to the station to the time they pulled out full of dino juice. While this wasn't a scientifically controlled experiment, I think I'm pretty close to how long the average car takes to full up and I'm not even taking into consideration the time it took them to drive to the gas station. I'll assume it was on their way so they only had to pull into the station.

I have about 32,000 miles on my car in three weeks less than a year so I'm going to end up with right around 33,000 miles on the car this year. If I had driven my Toyota Tacoma truck all year instead of the MINI, I would have to had to stop for gasoline exactly 100 times as I can get 325 to 340 miles per tank.

Doing simple math I have spent a cumulative 2 hours and 26 minutes plugging and unplugging my car this year. If I was driving my Toyota, I would have spent over 11 and a half hours sitting at a gas station waiting for the tank to fill.

So I ask: Who's really wasting their time?

30,000 Zero Emission Miles in Eleven Months

Yesterday was eleven months to the day (June12th, 2009 to May 12th 2010) since I picked up MINI-E #250 from Morristown MINI. Yesterday was also the day that the cars odometer rolled past 29,999 to an even 30,000 just as I turned into my driveway as I returned home from work.

Electric cars have a long way to go before they are accepted by the majority of the public as a legitimate alternative to gasoline burning cars.  There are still many questions and obstacles like the high cost of batteries, the usable life span of the batteries, the effects the ambient temperature has on the range, the unavailability of public charging infrastructure, but most of all the single charge range of the current EV's. Until recently when Tesla introduced the Roadster there were no production cars that you could purchase that could consistently go100 miles on single charge regardless of the whether conditions. 100 miles per charge seems to be the accepted bare minimum for an EV to be really considered a serious player and have a chance to sell in numbers great enough to warrant production by a major auto maker.

Most of the general public has the perception that we currently don't have the technology to build and sell a car, for a competitive price, that could go far enough on a single charge to satisfy their daily driving requirements. If anything, I hope that people that read about me and my adventures with the MINI-E realize that the auto makers can make a car that can be used as a daily driven commuter car and be used for high mileage driving if the circumstances are right. 30,000 miles in less than a year is much more than the average person drives. In fact, the average driver logs about half the miles that I'll have on the car next month when my first year with the car is over.

I know that the car wouldn't work for everyone. There are plenty of people that drive less miles than I do in a year but have the need to longer individual trips, so yeah, a car with a 100 mile range just wouldn't work for them. However, I believe most households that have more than one car could use a 100 mile EV and could save a lot of money doing so. The cost of maintenance of these cars is dramatically lower than that of an internal combustion engine vehicle because there are so few moving parts to wear out and need replacement. Plus the fuel cost (electricity vs gasoline) is dramatically lower. Depending on what part of the country you live in the average cost to power your electric car would be around $2.50 to $4.50 per 100 miles you drive.

Lately I've been interviewed by quite a few journalists that have heard of the high mileage I'm putting on the car and many of them ask me if I know of anyone else that has driven an electric car more than 30,000 in a single year. I've asked around the EV community and nobody seems to know of anyone that has. I know some of the EV-1 drivers put as many as 50 or 60,000 on their cars over a 3 to 4 year period, and that some of the Toyota RAV4 drivers have 150,000 miles on them but they were sold from 1997 to 2003 so they are all 7 to 13 years old. The Tesla roadster is capable of doing it, but I don't know if anyone would buy one for $110,000 and then basically drive it into the ground like I'm doing to the MINI-E.

If anyone knows of anyone that has driven their EV more than this in a year, please leave a comment with the details. The more people see that these cars are capable of high mileage driving, the quicker the public will realize that driving electric is a legitimate alternative to gasoline powered cars.

MINI-E Program Extended, Will Transition To The ActiveE!

While the trial lease participants haven't yet been notified, it appears as though BMW has announced what we all expected, they are going to extend the MINI-E leases beyond the one year we all agreed to. How many of the existing participants agree to continue will depend greatly on how much the monthly payment will be. We are currently on the hook for $850.00 per month which does include all maintenance and collision and comprehensive insurance. I think most of us agreed to be in this program because we wanted to be part of something that we believe in, not because we think the car is worth an $850 per month lease payment. I know that's way I got involved. I wanted to offer my help and support in the hope that I could help prove that there is a market and demand for electric vehicles. That many people are sick of polluting the air we breath and paying outrageous amounts of money for gasoline while we send billions of dollars for imported oil to radical regimes that are no friend to the US.

I would definitely like to continue and extend my lease for another year, provided the second year lease payments are much lower than $850. I do think BMW will be reasonable here since it is in their best interest to keep many of the same participants involved. We all have installed and inspected wall chargers and that was probably the biggest hurdle for BMW in getting this program off the ground. (Follow this link to read Richard Steinberg's MINI-E program overview.) To now remove all the chargers and install them in new locations just makes no sense at all as the cost would be about $2,500 per participant. Removing that cost alone should knock $200.00 off the monthly payment. I'm going to go out and say I expect the lease offer for the second year to be $450 to $500 per month. I think if the cost is in that range most of the participants will re-up and be happy about it.

Finally, the real carrot in continuing the lease is that BMW is planning on offering a similar lease program for the ActiveE and it's scheduled to begin mid 2011 which is when our lease extensions will end and they are planning on offering us the option to transition into an ActiveE. Now that's what we all have been waiting to hear. The only question I have is "Why another trail lease?" How much data and research do they need. Other auto manufacturers have already announced that they will sell EV's and extended range plug in hybrids in the near future. BMW needs to get out there and announce that they will be selling these cars soon, not only testing them. I believe we will hear a similar announcement soon because I do believe they are committed to selling an EV soon, and that they are just waiting for the right time to announce it. For now we'll have to live in the "research" stage. I'm up for it, the only question is: can I transfer my license plates to the ActiveE?

At Least Someone's Charging Up!

It's been two weeks now since I last drove MINI-E #250. I guess the holiday season hasn't helped as the service technicians probably only worked a few days in the past two weeks.

At least my charger is getting some use even if it's not from my car. I had a couple pioneers stop by my restaurant to charge up recently. Jim McLaughlin and his lovely wife stopped by for dinner during a snow storm and topped off their charge while they were eating. They live in Princeton so they would need close to a full charge to get home from Montclair anyway. Then, a couple days ago, David Miller stopped by at lunchtime for a bite and about an hour of charging. He was coming from New York City and was worried if he would make it the rest of the way home so the charge was just enough to alleviate any range anxiety he might of had. Since I installed the charger at the restaurant in October I've probably had 10 or 12 MINI-E pioneers stop by and juice up and just about everyone had something to eat while they waited.

I think once electric cars begin to increase in numbers on our roads, it will make a lot of sense for businesses, and especially restaurants, to have public chargers at their location. Since you can't charge for the energy, you could charge a "parking fee" for the EV parking spot and the electric would be no extra cost. I own the property that my restaurant is located at and I have a 53 car parking lot that Nauna's & my tenant Quick Chek share and I would definitely want to have a public charging stations there if there are cars on the road that will use them. How about franchises like McDonald's? If every McDonald's had high power chargers there would be a network of public chargers that would make charging on the fly very convenient. Plus, they could charge for the parking spot as well as get the additional business as most of the people would likely go in and get something to eat while the car is charging. This doesn't only apply to food establishments though. How about places like Walmart? Charge while you shop! Plus, they might even get the customers to spend more money in the store because they would need to spend more time there because they were charging up. Instead of a half hour in the store they might spend one full hour there. It's already proven that the longer people stay in the store the more they buy. That's why the stores are designed to keep you in there as long as possible.

Anyway, I wish I had #250 back to charge up myself, but as long as I don't I'm happy the charger is getting some use.

New Wall Charger (sticker included)

A couple day's ago I had the electrical contractor that installed my wall charger come back and install a new wall charger. The first one worked fine, there were no functional issues at all. The problem was it didn't have a sticker on it that said it was tested as a complete unit and my local electrical inspector failed it when he did the inspection. This has turned out to be the single biggest problem MINI has had to deal with in the whole program. In fact, there are rumors that Richard Steinberg of BMW wakes up at night in cold sweats screaming "It has the sticker, it has the sticker" but this has not yet been confirmed.
There are somewhere between 450 and 500 Mini-E's on the road now and only a handful have had inspectors fail them over this issue. Basically, the problem comes from the fact that the wall charger and the cable that is attached to it were both tested and approved by Underwriters Labs, but they were tested separately and not a complete unit and some of the New Jersey inspectors would not accept it. None of the 100 or so chargers in New York failed and I think only 1 or 2 out of the 250 in California failed. The crazy thing is, the new charger is EXACTLY the same as the one they took away other than a shiny sticker on the cable. In fact, the "bad" charger that was taken away will go back to the factory where they will put the sticker on the cable and ship it out to be used again, but now it's safe because of the sticker. That's one powerful sticker, let me tell you. I'm now scheduled for re-inspection next week, lets hope the sticker does it's magic and we can finally put this charger issue to rest.

The devil is in the infrastructure

If you talk to most people about EV's and ask them why they think there aren't really any available to purchase (Unless you have $110,000 for a 2 two seat Tesla) chances are you'll get answers like "Battery technology isn't there yet" or "Because big oil has spent tens of millions of dollars to keep them from being made available" or even "EV's require such little maintenance that auto manufacturers won't make them because they'll lose so much money on repairs". Over the past few years I have had a lot of conversations with friends and acquaintances on the very subject so I know what people think. Personally, I think all of those reasons have some degree of legitimacy, but having now been part of the Mini E program I realize that perhaps the biggest hurdle is the infrastructure. Mini is struggling with different state and local electric codes and getting chargers installed for all of the participants has been more difficult than they anticipated. The auto manufacturers know this is going to be a big issue and require a lot of time and resources. This is going to add to the already high cost of making EV's because of the high cost of the batteries. Last week I posted about how New Jersey in particular has been a tough state for Mini to get the chargers approved for use in. It's such a new industry that I think some of the inspectors are being overly cautious when they inspect the chargers. In reality, the chargers are really not much more than a 220V outlet like you already have in your home for an electric range of clothes dryer. All the electronics that control the charging are built into the car. This is just one aspect of the infrastructure challenges the auto manufacturers will face as they develop and manufacturer EV's

Last week, at the California Air Resources Board's 2009 ZEV Technology Symposium, Richard Steinberg the Mini-E program manager made a presentation that detailed the program. Richard spent a lot of time on infrastructure issues, and one of the most telling lines of the presentation was "BMW/MINI is in the car business; BEV's placed us in the infrastructure business" Talk about leaving your comfort zone! The presentation talks about how quickly the program moved along. BMW only started talking about making a Mini E in the Spring of 2008. They engineered, built and shipped 500 electric Mini E's in less than 12 months! Clearly making the cars is not the big problem, it's going to be charging them. I do give BMW a lot of credit now, more than I initially did. Nobody else has put an EV on the road for real world testing since GM's Ev1 and Toyota's RAV4 EV, and both of those projects ended quickly without the manufacturers committing to continue EV production. BMW has created the Project i program with the sole purpose of building and selling EV's. The Mini E is the beginning, not the end, as was the case with the EV1 and the RAV4.

The good news is that BMW isn't going it alone. Just about all the major auto manufacturers are working on EV's and while thy won't be sharing secrets about the cars they plan to produce, they are working together on Infrastructure Standardization. Public charging stations will need to be able to be used by all EV's and have 220V and 110V capabilities. Issues like should the chargers have an attached cable or should the cable be portable and carried in the car? Recently it was announced that SAE standard J1772 plug would be used as the industry standard, but it doesn't seem like all the auto manufacturers are on board with that decision and discussions are ongoing.

As with all new technologies, there is a learning curve and a tremendous amount of time and investment needed in the very beginning. I'm sure BMW didn't think this would be a walk in the park, and I don't think they started Project i only to terminate the program before they bring EV's to the market for sale. I do hope they see the amount of interest the Mini E program is generating and realize most us in the trial lease program understand it will be a difficult process to develop the necessary infrastructure to make BEV's a viable option for the masses. Just like the manufacturers will have hurdles, the people that buy the first round of EV's available for sale in the next few years will have difficulty finding palaces to charge. That being said, I think there are enough people willing to deal with the inconveniences that will exist to provide the demand for these vehicles that the manufacturers need to have to continue to invest in them. Just about everyone I meet and talk to about the car asks me when will they be able to buy an EV. I'm certain there is a tremendous market for EV's out there just waiting for some manufacturer to mass produce them and offer them for sale (no more closed end leases!). The infrastructure problems will be sorted out in time and BMW will have a head start from the information gathered from the Mini E program. I just hope it doesn't take too long. After my short while driving this car I know I don't want to go back to an ICE, and I won't if there is an electric option when my time with the Mini E is up. I'll deal with the lack of available chargers, just sell me the car.

Three months down

It's hard to believe that a quarter of the year I have with the Mini E has already passed. I have driven 7,200 zero emission miles, a little less than I expected to drive in that time, but that is because I didn't have a 220V wall charger for the first month and could only drive the car every two or three days. I had expected to put about 35,000 miles on the car this year and now I think I'll finish with around 30,000 -32,000. Being in the program is expensive as it costs $850.00 per month to lease the car so I planned on using the car as much as possible. I should have my second wall charger installed at my restaurant soon, so I'll now be able to drive as much as I want without the worry of having enough juice to make the 32 mile drive home at night. Since my home to work round trip is about 64 miles, I really only had 40-50 miles of extra driving range during the day and sometimes it wasn't enough. Now, I'll be able to drive the 32 miles to work(more when I make some stops along the way), then plug in & top off when I get there. I'll then have a range of 100+ miles before I go back to the office where I can top off if necessary to drive the 32 miles home. I will now have a range of up to 200 miles a day which is way more than I'll need 99% of the time. This will also ease my concerns about the effect cold weather will have on the batteries. I know the range is going to suffer from the use of the heater, and in really cold temperatures the batteries will undoubtedly be affected. Having the 60amp wall box at work will guarantee I can get home, no matter how cold it gets. I can even pre heat the car while it's charging and leave with a warm car and 100% charge. I want to thank Mini & Marian Hawryluk in particular for making this happen. I'm sure the participants that are getting additional wall chargers like me will put them to good use. Until there are public charging stations in convenient locations EV's drivers will struggle to feel confident about their range. However I do think there are enough people that are passionate enough to overcome the lack of chargers the first few years of EV deployment. One unexpected benifit I have had since I've become involved in this program is I have had the opportunity to meet, both in person and online, many great people that are EV advocates. There are more of them than I thought and these people can't wait for an affordable EV with a decent range (100+ miles) to be available to purchase. I get emails from people from all over the world that have read this blog and either had questions for me or just wanted to tell me they read the blog and can't wait until they can buy an EV. With the advancements in battery technology and the huge amounts of money currently being invested in the industry, we will not have to wait long. Nissan is the first automaker to announce that they will mass produce a 100% BEV, the Leaf and it has sent shockwaves across the industry. They plan to produce 300,000 Leafs annually by 2012. No other major automaker has announced production plans nearly as aggressive. The big question for me is what does BMW have planned? They have invested a lot of money and time in the Mini-E program. They must plan to use the information they gain from me and the other 499 Mini-E's for something. Personally, I'd like to see a small 4 door sedan with a 150 mile range, but after 3 months with the Mini-E, I'd probably buy anything that doesn't require gasoline. One things for sure, I'm not going to be happy when Mini asks for the car back. I still think(hope) they will offer some of the participants(me) the option to keep the car for an extended period. What will they do with the 500 cars? They can't just take them apart and crush them like GM did. That was (and still is) a PR nightmare for GM. Mini won't make the same mistake, I'm sure they have something planned for continued real world testing. One thing is for sure, whether it's the Mini-E or another EV, I'll be driving an electric car. I love the feel of the electric motor, the quietness, the smooth acceleration, the fact that I'm not polluting as I drive, the fact that I don't have to stop to buy gas at all and the fact that I'm not giving my hard earned money to the big oil cartels. Three months down already? Time does fly when you're having fun.