banned google

With the temperatures dipping into the 40s this week, I'm quickly reminded how much the cold effects the range of my i3. Just a couple of weeks ago I was averaging between 70 and 80 miles per charge. I'm now down in the 60s and it's only October! I figure it's a good time to remind the seasoned i3 owners - and inform newbies, what to expect in the coming fall and winter months. It's the time of year when the leaves start turning color, when Sundays mean most televisions in the US are tuned to football games and the Holidays are just around the corner. However something even more grim than the best Halloween costume is also making its return: Reduced range for EV owners. I think back six years ago to my first year in the MINI-E program. It was 2009 and there weren't many electric vehicles on the roads, especially outside of Southern California. About five months into the MINI-E Trial Lease program there was suddenly a rush of owners bringing the cars to their...

Setting the preconditioning feature from the i3's iDrive is simple, but not as intuitive as I believe it could be. You can set the time of departure for every day of the week and the i3 will be charged, preconditioned and ready, provided you're charging from a proper 240v, level 2 electric supply.  In many ways electric cars are very similar to their internal combustion counterparts and that's by design. Most major OEMs are afraid to make something that's "too different" from what their existing customer base is comfortable with. However there are features in electric vehicles that are indeed drastically different. The first one that comes to mind is regenerative braking which allows the electric motor to convert the vehicle's kinetic energy back into electricity which in turn recharges the battery. This feature changes the driving dynamics of the car (some more than others depending on how aggressive the regenerative braking system is) and the operator ne...

As the temperatures drop, so will your range. That's life with an electric car, but there are ways to minimize the effects of the cold. I remember back to my first year in the MINI-E program. It was 2009 and there weren't many electric vehicles on the roads, especially outside of Southern California. About five months into the MINI-E Trial Lease program there was a rush of participants bringing their cars to their MINI dealer for service, telling them something was wrong with their cars. This occurred in late October... Suddenly, the cars couldn't go as far as we were used to, and the range drop off seemed to happen very quickly, without notice and without reason, leaving many people to assume their car was malfunctioning, and perhaps had a bad battery. Some of the people even swore the range drop coincided with their last service visit, so there had to be something done at the dealership that caused the loss of range. I had read quite a bit about electric cars before getti...