MINI-E Survives the "Left Running All Night" Test!

I got up this morning and was ready to leave with my wife to go for a Saturday morning drive like we often do. I grabbed my wallet and cell phone but conspicuously absent from the counter were my keys. I always put my wallet and keys next to my cellphone charger so I never forget to take any of them when I leave in the morning so it was unusual that the keys weren't there. I'm not the kind of person that leaves them anywhere and often has to look for them. I'm structured and very organized, sometimes too much so. If the keys weren't on the counter than there really was only one other place they would be: in the ignition of the car!

I walked out into the garage and there they were, in the ignition and the car was "running". I use the word running but I really should say "turned on" because there is no engine to be running. In fact, if there had been an engine "running" I most certainly wouldn't have left it "turned on" all night like I did.

Last night was a busy night at the restaurant and I got home a little after midnight. When I was just about home I got a text from one of my employees that flew into Chicago last night and he was telling me he just landed after a 5 hour delay at Newark Liberty Airport. I was only a mile or so from home when he texted me so I figured I'd wait until I got home to reply. So as soon as I pulled into the garage, I turned off the radio and headlights and then replied to his text. We exchanged a few messages about how he now missed his connecting flight and needed to rent a car to get to his final destination because there were no more flights that night. I then grabbed the stuff I had in the car, and went inside my house leaving the car on all night.

I've never done this before and I haven't even heard of any of the other MINI-E drivers doing it either. There were however a couple of things that conspired to my making this mistake.

1) The car is completely quiet when it's turned on but not moving. If it had been an internal combustion car, I would have most certainly shut it off. I guess it's possible to leave the keys in the ignition with an ICE car, but not leave to the car running in a quiet garage.

2) I didn't need to charge the car last night. I had charged the car at work yesterday, so when I arrived home I was still at about 70% SOC and there was no need to charge up. I would have plenty of juice to take a drive with my wife in the morning and then drive to work and plug in there. As I have stated here before, I charge at work as much as possible because my electric rate at work is $.11/kWh verses $.18kWh at home. If I had needed to charge it when I got home, the car would have let me know it was still turned on when I plugged in by not accepting the charge so I would have realized what I did.

3) I have a digital keypad to unlock my door from the garage to the house to I didn't need my keys to get inside my house.

I did learn one thing from this. The car had about 5% less charge in the morning than it did when I left it at night so there must be a draw going on when the car is sitting and turned on. I know the battery fans go on every now and then to bring fresh air across the modules so I guess that could be it.

I can imagine how much carbon monoxide would have been in the garage this morning is I did manage to leave an internal combustion engine car running in there all night. I recently installed new garage doors that are insulated and seal the opening really well to prevent drafts so there wouldn't be a way for the gas to escape. 

One good thing to think about is I guess suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning will be a thing of the past once battery electric cars are in everyone's garage!

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.

Sound Off

I was going to do a post about the recent push to enact a law that will require all electric cars to get this: Install a device to make a noise all the time the car is driven under a certain speed! The thought is that electric cars are so quiet that they are going to be virtual killing machines, running over cyclists, the blind, poor little children, the family dog and anything foolish enough to come close to the streets once electric cars hit the showrooms.

Then, today I read an article on this subject at AutoBlogGreen by Chelsea Sexton, a long time EV advocate that has been on the front lines of the electric car movement(if you want to call it that) since she worked for GM and was involved in the EV-1 program. Anyone that has seen Who Killed The Electric Car should remember her as she was a prominent figure in the movie. Anyone that hasn't seen it needs to, as soon as possible! She managed to put everything I was thinking, and then some into words, so instead of me going on about why I think this is such a bad idea, follow the link above and read what Chelsea has to say about this, I really think she is spot on.

I have traded some messages with her in the past on this subject and one of the things she believes is that the auto manufacturers should be getting more involved in this instead of just sitting by the side and waiting to see what is legislated and she is right about that. Perhaps they don't want to look insensitive to the requests of the National Federation of the Blind? Perhaps they are luke-warm about EV's anyway so they really don't care if this hurts them. I'm not even sold that the NFB even really started this. I think there was another player(hello big oil) that brought this whole issue up. Where's the data that shows this is necessary? There have been electric cars on the roads for a while now, although not is great numbers, are they running people down? I drove my MINI-E 34,000 miles so far and managed not to kill anyone. How about the other 600 MINI-E's driving this past year, did ANYONE hit a pedestrian? I haven't heard of any incident like that. How about the GM EV-1's that were on the roads for a few years or the Toyota RAV-4's that have been out there for almost a decade, can we pull some data first before jumping the gun? Can we know what we are dealing with here before we enact laws? Also, the new cars today are so quiet you can hardly hear them unless they are under acceleration. The industry has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to make their cars as quiet as possible. Now the government wants them to add noise to them. We should be striving to reduce noise pollution, not increase it. We should be striving to make the roads as quiet and peaceful as possible so we would hear the sound of tires rolling on the pavement as an EV approaches.

I'll be contacting the executives that head up the newly formed electric car division of BMW. As one of the more active MINI-E drivers I have had the pleasure of getting to know many of the top people in the program, I even had four pages dedicated to yours truly in BMW's 2009 annual report(pages 192 to 195). I know many of the BMW executives (US & Germany) read this blog so they will probably know ahead of time that my emails will be coming. I would like to see them to take a stand on this and urge the politicians to look at the facts before rushing into legislation that may in fact prove unnecessary. If the 2013 BMW Megacity has to beep or brup or whine like the cars on the Jetsons cartoon all the time that they drive under 30mph you might as well pack it in and start the new "hydrogen car division" and keep us waiting another 20 years or so to get off oil. People are not going to want to buy an electric car, even BMW electric car if it sounds like a toy and these artificial noises do just that.

Nice Day, Nice drive, Great Range..

 

When I woke up this morning it seemed like a great day leisurely drive around North Western New Jersey so my wife and I hopped into #250 and took it for a 54 mile cruise through the country. We drove on all rural, secondary roads so it was mostly low speed driving, the kind of driving the MINI-E loves most. The temperature was in the low 70's so the battery was very happy also. It was a very enjoyable drive, as there were no other cars on the road to spoil the relaxing peacefulness of the quiet electric drive of the MINI-E. When we arrived home about two hours later we had driven 54 miles and still had an estimated 70 miles of range left. 124 miles, pretty good if I do say so myself.

Nice trip to the Delaware Water Gap

Yesterday morning my wife and I got up early and headed up to the Delaware Water Gap. It's a beautiful area with lots of scenic views of the Delaware River plus places to picnic and hike. It was about 45 miles from our home so I knew we could make it with the MINI-E, I just didn't know how much driving around we could do once we got there since I wanted to head back home with 45-50% charge.

We made it there with about 55% charge left so we took advantage of the extra juice and drove around for a while. The roads were empty and the MINI-E was at it's best in my opinion. Driving along country roads with the windows down and all you could hear was birds and the occasional sound of the tires rolling over gravel in the road. We didn't even want to turn the radio on it was so peaceful.

After a while we stopped at an Appalachian trail and went for a short hike. We didn't have the time to go too far but it's definitely a place that we'll return to when we have more time for a longer exploration.

We headed back home and finished the trip of 100.7 miles with 7% charge left which would be good for at least 10 more miles before I would have needed to use the 15 or so miles of "reserve" that the car has. The MINI-E is good for most driving environments but in my opinion, there is nothing better than driving it on winding country roads with the windows down and listening to the tires on the road, the slight whine of the regenerative braking and the sounds of the environment outside the car that you normally don't hear over the engine of an internal combustion engine car. I can't explain it, you have to experience it to know how much more enjoyable it is.