Electric Mini Cooper Has Rough Start 308
TopSpin writes "BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its Mini has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is 'learning quite a bit as we go.' Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets."
$850 a month?? (Score:2, Interesting)
This confirms what I've always suspected: the green fashion is for rich suckers first, then for the rest of us when oil runs out anyway.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
O RLY? The problem is solved? Exactly where can I buy these plant based fuels?
As the demand for biofuels causes competition with food production resources (land, water),
the cost of biofuels goes up. And they're not cheap now!
Re:Regular coopers (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they get heavier (batteries), and weight is the enemy of handling, so I'd think they'd be underpowered and bad handling.
In other words, BMW has figured out how to make an electric "Big 3" car.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.
Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.
So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.
Re:Regular coopers (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't imagine I'll be moving trading my Tundra in for an alternate fuel source vehicle any time soon.
Would you say the same thing when gas cost $12/gallon?
We are supposed to be in the worst economic recession in decades, and oil still costs $80/barrel. So where do you think oil price will be in a recovery?
I'd learn to say, "Make my hybrid a plug-in, please."
Being greener without the electric (Score:5, Interesting)
Theater isn't limited to security. There's a lot of "green theater" out there, searching for rich suckers. One of the rich that sometimes gets suckered is the government. I regard hybrids and the Prius somewhat skeptically. It's fuel economy isn't all that great, actually. Manufacturers are still ignoring a lot of low hanging fruit. They haven't smoothed the undersides of their cars. The rims are not aerodynamic. Car bodies are closer to teardrop shapes than bricks, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. They're getting better with weight, but they're still using too much steel where lightweight composites or aluminum or lighter alloys could go. Until fairly recently, they wouldn't even use lighter oils (for instance, 5w20 instead of 10w30), one of the cheapest, easiest ways to get a little more fuel economy.
Much better than the Prius is the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a turbodiesel that gets 65 MPG, and it still doesn't cover all the easy ways to increase fuel economy. It's not a hybrid. Proof that a lot more can be done, and that manufacturers have yet to get really serious about fuel economy.
So where is the 100 MPG vehicle? I've heard of quite a few prototype vehicles that get over 200 MPG. It can be done, what's the hold up? Not enough competition in the automobile market, I guess.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:1, Interesting)
Except, if you changed over all of those hundreds of millions of vehicles with little gasoline burning engines to hundreds of millions of vehicles with electric motors and batteries, you would have to put up completely new (massive) power distribution networks, thousands of big new electric power plants and somehow come up with all of the rare raw materials (like copper - which is already on the road to short supply) for all of those hundreds of millions of electric motors and trillions of batteries (you do know that something like the Tesla Roadster [wikipedia.org] has 6831 battery cells in it, right?).
Somewhere along the line, someone didn't quite think this electric vehicle revolution through...
Re:Regular coopers (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as all electrical or even hybrid vehicles all my experiences with them tell me a few things, they don't have the same sort of get up and go power to them that a regular vehicle has in most cases and they are terribly expensive to repair.
Hmm, your Tundra can do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, and a quarter mile in under 13? A stock Tesla roadster can http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/video/3068-tesla-roadster-sport-nedra-record-12-643-1-4-mile.html [teslamotorsclub.com]
And a 1972 Datsun converted to pure electric is even faster. 0-60 in 2.9 seconds, quarter mile in 11.5 seconds. http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/whitezombie.php [plasmaboyracing.com]
That's an awful lot of get up and go power.
As for repairs, all indications are battery electric vehicles will be much cheaper to maintain and repair, due to the much simpler design of an electric motor vs a ICE. Time will tell on that one. But with no oil to change, no air filters, no timing belts, PCV valves or catalytic converters, and only one moving part in an electric motor -- it seems a good bet.
--Woof!
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:2, Interesting)
The theory behind biofuels is that they could be carbon neutral. While they would put C02 into the atmosphere when you burn them, the next crop would consume the same amount of C02
My beef with biofuels is that they compete with food for farmland.Call me crazy, but as much as I like driving, I prefer to eat.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
No surprise there. Corn is horrifyingly inefficient for producing Ethanol as a fuel. Ethanol is highly miscible with water making extraction of the fuel its self rather energy intensive to say nothing of the production of fertilizers etc being petroleum derived. Algae biodiesel and mycodiesel show much more promise. The mycodiesel can run off a cellulose feedstock which is handy because that's mostly what you have as a by-product of extracting the lipids from algae. The lipids are fairly hydrophobic so extraction from a liquid medium isn't that hard. The only real problem is efficiently breaking the cells and pressing the oils out of them. Another option is drying the algae and reforming the material using thermal depolymerization and fischer tropsch reactions to synthesize hydrocarbons among many other useful chemicals. There's even a patent on using a strain of bacteria that can produce ethanol from syngas which is a product of the thermal depolymerization. iofuels aren't dead, the important game changing ones are just ignored in favor of that failure named corn derived ethanol.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces?
I work on my own vehicles, which makes me long for EVs. No more fuel-soaked hands, for one thing. Just moving pollution controls from the car to the power plant is a huge win, too. If you wouldn't rather have an EV than an ICE given similar performance characteristics, you don't understand the problem. With that said, we are going to need battery technologies that are more useful if we're going to make the switch.
I live in Canada. I would rather have an ICE over an EV because I understand all too well the problems of electronics and batteries when mixed with cold weather. Nobody heats with electricity, it's too expensive. Even if this came with an electric heating wand I can shove up my a$$ I still wouldn't want it.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's actually quite a bit of power generation capacity going to waste by virtue of not being able to store that power effectively between times of high and low demand. Actually if we made use of electric cars as temporary stores of power they could help stabilize the grid. Besides, we'll probably need to build more plants anyway considering that we need more capacity and cleaner more environmentally friendly plants in the near future. As for resources, if Copper becomes too scarce, the price rises and either we find a cheaper replacement or a new way to get more Copper.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hey it's a good idea. Had we been on electric automobiles for the past 80 years the crossover between automobiles, portable computers, robotics, and space exploration would have been significant.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:5, Interesting)
That was not a "mistake". The purpose of the "EV1 phase", as you call it, was to construct a demonstration designed to "prove" (or, at least, to create the impression) that the ZEV mandate in California could not practically be met, as part of GM's efforts to have that mandate altered. Once the mandate was altered, the overall purpose for which that program that the "EV1 phase" was part of had served its purpose, so naturally both the "EV1 phase" and the entire program were terminated.
Your mistake is thinking that the program was aimed at creating viable, production electric cars. It was a political maneuver that acheived its political aim, and then was terminated.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
The issue is one of investment.
Making algae farms that you can harvest from efficiently requires a major investment. Buying corn from a farmer who's already harvesting corn doesn't require such an investment.
Corn is terrible for making Ethanol. But currently, the WORLD has a corn infrastructure in place. The farmer is going to sell his corn crop to someone. It doesn't matter to him who's buying it - someone making tortillas or someone making Ethanol.
Corn is popular, not because it's good or efficient, but because it requires no additional investment. Just a reallocating from the poor to the rich.
Re:Being greener without the electric (Score:1, Interesting)
Much better than the Prius is the Ford Fiesta Econetic, a turbodiesel that gets 65 MPG, and it still doesn't cover all the easy ways to increase fuel economy. It's not a hybrid. Proof that a lot more can be done, and that manufacturers have yet to get really serious about fuel economy.
Yes, the Econetic does get 65 MPG vs the Prius' 57MPG (yes, my daughter gets an average 57 MPG combined), but Econetic is not and will not be available in North America. The president of Ford Motors was asked about bringing it to NA and his response was that it was not possible as it would be too hard to import and too expensive to build here.
So given the choice of an available Prius or an unavailable Econetic .. the choice is obvious.
Re:Diesels (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the startup time is worse. Hybrids need almost instant starting combustion engines. A steam engine, for example, would not work.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
i just want you to know, that if you divide the population of the planet into families of 4, and gave each family a house with a yard (suburbanite america style) that we would all fit into a city the size of Texas.
And we'd all have one hell of a commute!
Anyway, I did some quick math, and I figure with a 30x30 meter lot (that's about 90 feet on a side, if you're non-metric), you would have about 745 million lots in Texas. Given that there are upwards of 6.5 billion of us on this planet, you wouldn't even have enough homes for HALF of the worlds population.
Of course, my math might be wrong, so if you'd show me your calculations that would be great!
Re:Diesels (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm still confused about this hybrid thing. Go to Europe, and you see the same Dodge minivan picking up kids in front of school, but with a turbodiesel. I know the market is manipulated there too, but I'd prefer the established 40- 45 mpg tech of a TD. The 335d is a great example. More Torque than the titans of Detroit of old. A Peugeot Diesel was my renta-car, and it feared no Berlin Taxi. I'd take a Jetta TDI over a Prius, etc.
This post is so inaccurate it's almost a complete joke and it amazes me this is +5 insightful.
I apologize if my English is poor, but as someone who lives in Berlin, it's clear to me you've probably visited Europe once on vacation and saw one random person driving a weird car for whatever reason, then like most Americans, made the aggrandized generalization that all of Europe must be the same based on one data point in a city known to have a progressive and very individualistic population. The fact is hardly anyone drives "minivans", much less a Dodge minivan (or any american car or SUV for that matter). The major car companies here are Renault and BMW and that other Italian company. Cars are not radically different. What is different is that most people buy smaller cars because our roads are smaller, lighter cars are more fuel efficient, and because it's extremely rare for anyone to have more than two kids most people don't have enough kids to justify the typical American soccer mom SUV or minivan. Plus, we actually have safe public transportation, so most people don't even cart their kids around everywhere like in the USA, their kids just take public transportation like every other commuter here. In fact, most schools in Berlin don't even have car pick up places--you probably saw someone dropping their kid off at a store.
It's an inconvenience and possibly not street legal to drive an over sized, armored American car here. Our gas is much more expensive than what you pay in the USA, so much of this is driven by economics--what you guys have to look forward to when your gas becomes $8 per liter or whatever the conversion is--except you guys will be decades behind in public transportation infrastructure that you won't be able to fall back on.
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see ... GM lost a bundle building them and leased them below cost. They could have sold them, you know, in exchange for money, to the drivers .... or they could have junked them, at cost. One way would have made some money, the other did cost some money.
No wonder the government likes them enough to bail them out. BFF when it comes to fiscal common sense.
Re:Being greener without the electric (Score:3, Interesting)
The price of an item already does a pretty good job at estimating its cost to the environment. With the introduction of a system that properly implements carbon/polution credits this will only become more accurate.
Re:Diesels (Score:5, Interesting)
Good grief. Stop displaying your ignorance of economics, American diesel history and European laws.
You couldn't buy a diesel because when Detroit had tried to sell Diesels to Americans in the seventies and eighties, they did it by essentially repurposing gasoline engines. These engines were horrible - noisy, stinky, and with particulates large enough to qualify as dirt. Not to mention prone to breakdown. Combine it with expensive fuel, and there was no reason for anyone to own a diesel car in the US.
The emissions laws, by the way, are more stringent in Europe. The current US standards are equivalent to the EU standards of 1996, and way behind the 2009 EU standards.
That's why the latest diesel engines from Europe blow away any US diesel engine. The only problem is that the European advanced diesel engines are used to running on ultra-low sulfur diesel, which is only mandated for after 2010 in the US.
So really, the only legislative reason for the lack of European diesel engines in the US market is because US fuel is allowed to suck.
It already works in big cities (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps walkable is a stretch, but public transit makes it easier to do without a car for work commutes. Walkable neighborhoods do a great job of providing the rest of your needs. Nobody I know in this city without a car has moved due to changing jobs, they just switch train/bus routes or stops. Cars are rare enough that not much space is wasted with empty parking spaces, so within 15 minutes walk there are hundreds of restaurants, several major grocery stores, among other things. Rent is a bit more expensive, but the savings on car expenses and the cost of my time to maintain a car more than make up for it.
There are certainly some jobs where non-car transit methods simply won't work, but that's in the minority. Walkable neighborhoods do work and are actually quite nice to live in.
PML In-Wheel motors Mini (Score:2, Interesting)
Brazil changed over (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Electric car with problems? (Score:2, Interesting)
Making algae farms that you can harvest from efficiently requires a major investment. Buying corn from a farmer who's already harvesting corn doesn't require such an investment.
Soybeans would have been a better direction. Just about anyone who can grow corn could grow soybeans instead. Many farmers already have the equipment necessary so they can rotate their fields. Corn is very hard on the soil.
It doesn't matter to him who's buying it - someone making tortillas or someone making Ethanol.
Corn used for food is a different variety than corn used for ethanol or animal feed. They would of course compete for the same land, so the farmer would have to make the decision of who to sell to at seeding time.
But if your argument is infrastructure, then ethanol still loses to soybeans. To use more than ~10% ethanol a gasoline engine needs considerable modifications. Other than the new smog equipment on 'clean' diesels, a diesel engine can use any percentage of biodiesel. (although research does need to be done on lowering the cloud point)
If we had pushed Biodiesel instead of ethanol, we could have tackled large fuel users (fuel per engine), such as trains and OTR trucks first, while the average consumer slowly migrated to diesel cars at their own pace. Which would have allowed time for algae infrastructure to mature.