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.

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.