NY Times Reports: MINI-E Drivers Have Bonded With Their Cars!

Yesterday the NY Times published a story on how the MINI-E trial lease participants love their MINI-E's. The story was based on a yearlong U.C. Davis study that found an overwhelming amount of MINI-E drivers love the cars and have found that they are comfortable living with the cars 80-100 mile range.

If you have been following this blog, you know I feel the same way. When the MINI-E program began, we were all sent emails asking if we wanted to participate in the study, I thought about it and since I didn't know how much of my time it would consume I never replied, so my thoughts although broadcast here on this blog, aren't included in the study. However judging from the results, it seems that I wasn't needed and the other MINI-E participants love their cars as much as I do and the big thing is that they don't feel constrained by the range either, a point that I have been trying to get across to non-EV drivers for a long time now: The limited range isn't a big deal! People that don't drive an EV worry about range anxiety more than the people that actually do drive one.   

Anyway, the results of this study don't surprise me one bit. The general public is going to love electric cars, they just need to get past their belief that they won't and give one a try. Another MINI-E driver, Peder Norby once wrote of the challenges facing the transition to electric cars: "Our greatest roadblock is the inertia of the status quo"   and this study further proves that point if you ask me. The people that HAVE had the chance to spend time with an electric car overwhelmingly like them and say they want to continue to drive electric. That's the case whether the car was an EV-1, a RAV4-EV, a Tesla, a Nissan LEAF or a MINI-E. We just need to convince more of the public to give them a chance, the cars themselves will do the rest.

BMW Rendering of Megacity vehicle

In today's NY Times there is an article on BMW's future plans to develop electric cars.There have been a lot of speculation and artist renderings about what BMW's 2013 Megacity car will look like. Remember, the MINI-E is the first electric car produced by BMW's Project I, and was meant to gather information used to help ultimately develop the electric Megacity car. This is the first time a rendering has actually come from BMW and not just some magazine or artist, so it is sure to have some styling cues as to how the Megacity will basically look. It's obviously a concept rendering, but it does tell us what BMW is thinking.

#250 and I are featured in a NY Times Video!

Stefania Rousselle was the video journalist assigned to do the video production.

Last Sunday I spent basically the whole day with Stefania Rousselle of the New York Times shooting video of me and the car. Stefania said the Times wanted to look at the car from two perspectives; living with the car in a suburban environment verses a city environment. Since I live in rural Chester, NJ I was chosen to give the suburban perspective and Adam Moore, who also has a MINI-E and lives in NYC was chosen to give the city life perspective. The video came out very nice, but how much detail can you really go into in 5 minutes? It would be really nice to explore the issues of both environments in a 30 minute documentary type production. I know Stefania has enough footage to put something like this together, she must have recorded at least 4 or 5 hours of video between the both of us, so maybe she'll do it in her spare time(If she ever gets any)...It was a lot of work to see only a few minutes of video, but I guess that's how this business works, you can never record too much. One thing I did take out of the experience, when you have a wireless mic on you all day, you can't forget it or you could say something that's not necessarily meant to be heard, but we won't get into that....
Click on the link below to view the video:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/03/27/automobiles/1247467462636/driving-an-electric-wave.html