Thanks to Chris for letting me charge up on the way to the very northern tip to New Jersey today.
Voltage at Chris' measured about 122 in the morning and 117 on the way home after dark. No trouble charging either time. Of course, the car would see about twice those numbers, or 244 to 234 volts. Well within ANSI specs. Unlike at my house which is often 253 volts and the Mini E won't fast charge.
By the way, the skiing was lousy, too many bare spots from all the wind.
I heard today from Clean Fuel Connections that the entourage from Mini will be visiting me in early mid January. Not just to diagnose the charging issue but with a potential work around and possibly a modified (fixed?) car to see if it has trouble with my high line voltage. I suspect mine is the highest of the bunch who are having trouble, which apparently numbers six. Not bad, 1% of the total. This is the sort of problem that needs to get figured out in the prototype stage.Now, if I can get really technical for a moment - Mike, you might remember this from your Electrical Engineering days.
You don't need a 15 kilowatt transformer to lower the line voltage to get around this problem. A transformer with a 12 volt 60 amp output could do the job theoretically. Wire the output in series with one side of the 240 volt line but opposing phase (symmetry is not needed) and you drop from 240 volts nominal to 228 volts. That should be a MUCH cheaper transformer. I'll post a schematic in a few days maybe but I doubt something like this would comply with the electrical code, so it is academic. Maybe try it on the 4th of July so that if it explodes, it would seem to be on purpose. Ha ha. Maybe I can find a picture of the cavalry with some explosions?
We got home with temperatures in the low 20's, line voltage about 252.6 and of course the Mini E won't charge, not even one blink or click.
After turning on almost everything in the house, the line voltage drops to 250.0 and bingo! It started charging and did not stop. I was expecting to need to get it down to 249, since recently 249.2 was not far enough down. Sounds like 249 to 250 is the threshold when temperatures are a bit below freezing.
I heard from a reputable source that the AC Propulsion safety limit (maybe there is another more official term? Jason, can you comment?) should be 264 volts. That gives plenty of margin past the ANSI spec of 252 max. To bad it doesn't hold in the cold.
How many Mini E drivers have this problem charging from the 240 volt wall box in the cold? Mostly in New Jersey?
Here is what I am pretty sure is happening:
The AC Propulsion electronics (the big brass box under the hood) checks the voltage when you plug it in. If it thinks it is too high, it won't charge to protect itself, or it will start charging and then see the problem and stop.
Something about the colder weather (maybe combined with a low battery charge) is making it judge the AC line voltage (mains voltage) too strictly. I typically have over 126.5 volts at the regular outlets around the house. So at the Clipper Creek charging interface (or wall box), it sees twice that, which is over 253 volts. (Please Please DO NOT try to measure this directly if you are a civilian. There are safe meters such as the Kill A Watt which will measure a regular outlet and you can multiply that by 2 for an estimate.)
Normally I would guess the AC Propulsion box is happy if the charging voltage is below 260 volts, but in the winter that threshold has slipped down about 3% and it now thinks 253 volts is too high. Well, our local power company PSE&G does a very good job keeping the voltage up in central New Jersey. I don't think there really is a problem from the power companies' point of view until the voltage gets to 128 volts, but I am not having any luck finding a specification. I just remember that from somewhere.
I think I can prove this to Mini, although they can probably verify it themselves. Too bad, I was looking forward to the promised house call. But I am super busy at work right now so I probably would not have time to meet them anyway until January.
If you are one of the Mini E drivers with this issue, try turning on everything in the house before you plug in your E. The extra load should pull the voltage down a bit and might be enough to make the car judge the voltage as safe. Don't forget to turn things off again as soon as the car has been charging for 15 seconds, especially the stove or the dryer. I even ran the Microwave but be sure to put at least a cup of water in it, they don't like to run empty.
I switched back and forth several times, and the car would always continue charging when the line voltage was at 240 or slightly below, but back up at 253 volts it would either not start at all or only blink a few times and then stop.
After all the theories that have come and gone, I am going to be really embarrassed if this gets disproved. But I am pretty confident this time. The real test will be tomorrow after the long commute to and from work and the low battery charge.
I cannot count how many theories have gone back and forth about what might be behind this charging problem. Several have been ruled out. I don't remember who first mentioned the cold, but I do have some evidence on that. The first time I remember having trouble charging was Sept 25, which was also the first day that the ambient temperature was below 60 degrees when I got home. (See, those tedious trip logs do come in handy.)
It was also the first time I ran the battery way below 0% to see what would happen. (That is how I remember the date, I posted a blog entry about it here.)
The only things I can say with confidence is that if battery charge is low on a cold day, I have trouble charging at 240 volts from the wall box in my garage. Pretty much every other theory I have examined seems to be full of holes.
The last couple days were about as cold as I have recorded this season, with low twenties yesterday. I was driving loaner Mini E # 008 until this morning, and I had more trouble getting #008 to charge than I ever had with my #458. This morning when I got #458 back from Princeton Mini, I had just as much trouble as with #008. The common element is temperature around freezing.
And both cars charge fine at 120 volts.
So when the engineers from Mini make a house call, we need to pick a cold day and I need to run the charge down low on the car. Heck, they can bring #008 by again if they run the charge down, then we have two chances to figure out the problem. Because once the car starts charging at 240 volts, the problem disappears until the next drive cycle. And you can fix the problem if you cannot reproduce it.
Some readers of this blog may get an incorrect impression from the lengths I go to when commuting in the all electric Mini E. Those who are also Mini E drivers might understand the assumptions I am making in writing this blog, such as what the headline photo implies. I have carelessly aimed this blog at fellow Mini E drivers. For those readers who don't have their own Mini E lease, let me set the context.
When Mini started taking applications, it was clear that I would not be considered since my normal commute was 150 miles per day, and on the outside they were accepting people who drove at most 110 miles per day. Even then it appeared that they would only accept my application if they were desperate. I worked with Google maps for quite a while and found a route to work on back roads that was about 110 miles round trip, and claimed that on my application. It turns out that route is not passable by car, the best I have done is around 116 miles, but normally 120 miles to save time. I argued strongly with Mini that this would be fine since I could charge the car at work and Mini finally agreed to lease me an E, after strenuous pursuit on my part. (I recently made the round trip without the benefit of charging all day at work, see link here.)
Being an engineer, I want to know things, such as the effect of cold weather on the range. In isolation. That is, I want to know the effect of cold weather, WITHOUT the effect of the heater drawing down the battery. And since I am already way out on the edge of the range limit, I go to perhaps ridiculous lengths to get this data without clouding it by other variables.
So let me ask, how many other Mini E drivers have even gotten a range estimate such as the one pictured at the top of my blog? Over 140 miles is quite rare I expect. Maybe most drivers rarely see over 100.
Let me ask how many Mini E drivers regularly commute over 100 miles per day? I know there are some, but I suspect it is less than one percent, and most or all are in Southern California, not the frozen North of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And the one I read about has a 240 volt charger at work and at home. I have only 120 volts at work.
So when I describe wearing 3 to 5 layers of clothes, preheating the Mini E with a portable heater, and drinking 5 cups of hot tea to stay warm on my long drive, this is NOT behavior that one should expect is required in an electric car, any more that the terrain in the above photo is likely to be encountered in your daily commute.
But some people will always test the conditions out on the edge. By profession I am a test engineer, and recounting these adventures is a testament to my personal curiosities, not to what the average driver of an electric car might expect.
Believe me, on the weekends we drive the Mini E just like any car, with the heater blazing, maybe without warm coats in cold weather, maybe driving hard and fast. And many days now I have run the heater near the end of my long weekday commute, regularly bouncing the "charge meter" off zero a few miles from home.
But on the edge I am very careful. And the car performs amazingly well at the extremes if you are careful. But you don't have to be anymore careful with an electric car than with the old "fossil fool" cars if you are not trying to reach extremes of range.
So I have the snow tires and decals, but they did not find the problem that causes #458 to balk at charging from 240 volts. So they say they will make a house call.
I'm not sure they understand that the car has to come off a long drive and be at low charge to have a high likelihood of not wanting to charge. I'll make it clear when they come to visit. Actually that might make it tricky to set up a visit with those conditions.
Michael with #249 says he has to wait between 10 and 60 minutes to get his Mini E to charge at 240 volts. But this loaner #008 I have is worse. For the two days I have had it, it won't even try at 240 volts when I get home, no blinking that stops after several seconds, nothing. But of course it is happy at 120 volts. And I have waited over an hour now.
I think the engineers from Mini might have a better chance reproducing the problem if they bring #008 over to my house after driving it to a low charge.
Robert with #304 posted a great article on the heater in the Mini E. It says the "PTC" heater (I think that means Positive Temperature Coefficient) can put out 3000 watts.
Mini said at first that the battery has 30,000 watt hours of usable capacity. (Later reports indicate slightly less if I recall.)
So running the heater at maximum for one hour should consume 10% of the range. I have never run it at full for more than a few minutes, I usually back off to half at that point. But theoretically, this means the two hour driving range (usually enough to drain the battery fully) might shrink to an hour and a half roughly, if it were cold enough to run the heater at maximum the whole time. At lower settings, the range reduction should be less than 20%. Maybe much less.
I measured heater power usage at low fan settings and posted them way back in September here. But this morning I measured again at the highest fan and heat settings with the windows open.
After 80 minutes at max heat the charge meter dropped 18%, which is a bit more than theory predicted above, but reasonable. It was in the upper 40s Fahrenheit and I left the hatch open. Temperature one inch from the heater vent was above 110 F with the fan at max, and the temperature was higher when the fan was slowed down. At fan setting #2, the temperature went off my scale, above 130 degrees F.
I have stayed away from using the heat on long drives. This is partly because of the reports other bloggers have posted about reduced range, but mostly because I'm from Minnesota where only the weak use the heater until the weather is below freezing. Ha. But I'm starting to think I can afford to use it more on my long commute. These numbers are encouraging.
While the charge gauge is pretty reliable, I find it to be pessimistic early in a drive and I almost always have more range than it indicates. I wonder if the calibration gets worse when the heater is on? This might explain some of the concerns that seem worse than the numbers I took.
One technical point about a "PTC" heater. It is designed not to overheat. So if you run the fan on low and turn the heat all the way up, the resistance of the heating element increases so that won't over heat and burn out. My measurements showed that the heater can maintain a 60 to 70 degree increase in temperature at the highest fan setting. But often I run it on lowest fan, and I notice it heat up and then cool down to just warm. This is what it is designed to do. Like Mini says, use at least the second fan setting with higher heat settings or the element will not reach maximum heat output.
By the way, 3000 watts is about 4 horse power. The 120 volt AC heater that I use to preheat my Mini E with "shore power" is 900 watts, and I usually run it for a couple hours by timer before I leave for work.
I have almost 13,000 miles on #458 and it finally happened - I got to work (60 miles from home) and unexpectedly had to head back home without charging the Mini E.
No Problem! I had even used the heater for half of my trip to work, something I rarely do but it was 29 degrees F on my way in and I did not have the hot drinks I usually have in the car to stay warm. So I ran the heater some after the cabin cooled off. (I had preheated the cabin to 88 that morning as usual, but after 20 miles it drops into the 60's.)
I have driven my commute several times very gently to see what I could do for range, so I was confident. I had plugged in at work but left after only one hour, so I added only about 4% to the charge before I left again for home.
I took back roads and really took my time. I have a column in my log to record how aggressively I drive, this is the only time I ever put down a "one" on the scale of one to five. It was mid morning so traffic was light but I still annoyed a few people by going slowly. On highway 12 in New Jersey, I drove maybe 30 mph and pulled onto the wide shoulder to let others pass at the 50 mph limit. On the big hill I got in the truck lane and crawled up at 20 mph.
And I arrived with 1% charge left. I even used the heater for the last 3 miles. I know there are ten miles left after the gauge hits zero, but I didn't need it. All in all I drove 124.6 miles, using the heater at the middle setting for about 30 miles. Starting temperature outdoors was 29 F, ended at 49 degrees with 58 degrees in the cab. In the middle I charged for one hour at 120 volts 12 amps adding only 4 miles to the range.
Despite the minor issues with this prototype car, we love it. It has never let me down, even when pushed to the extreme in cold weather. And I bet Mini will fix the minor charging problem next week when it goes in for the 13,000 mile checkup. Actually, it is getting to be a bit worse than minor.
We drove from central New Jersey to central Long Island New York yesterday. The trip was 108.7 miles, arrived with the dash board display estimating 24 miles remaining at 19% charge.
Forget cycling the ignition when there is a charging problem. The cause is moisture.
Mini, are you not doing the main work in southern California? What "The Firesign Theater" called "the stinking desert"? You guys need to take a Mini E up to Seattle and drive it around in the rain until you see this charging problem. Here is what happened to me tonight, and I have seen it before:
Come home in the rain, wipers on fast for much of the drive.
Plug in the car.
The RED light comes on steady on the Clipper Creek wall mounted safety box. (The GFCI tripped, but I ask that civilians please do not open the box to look at the LEDs.)
Unplug and plug back in, same RED light. Sound like moisture to you?
Try it again, the Clipper Creek box stays on (GREEN light) and the car starts to charge but stops after 5 seconds. OK, something dried out enough to keep the Clipper Creek box happy but the AC Propulsion electronics in the car sees the leakage now.
Unplug, try again, same thing.
Turn down the current to 12 amps, same thing. Of course if it is moisture, the leakage is related to voltage, not to current.
So I get out the low voltage charging interface, the portable 120 volt box. It charges fine.
After 30 seconds I switch back to 240 volts. The car stops as before with the Clipper Creek wall box still on.
Switch back to 120 volts, where presumably the leakage current is lower and it does not set off the safety trip in the car. Let it charge for a couple minutes while presumably drying out whatever got wet.
Switch back to the 240 volt wall box, and all it well in the world. It keeps charging.
Turn up the current to 50 amps. It keeps charging. Of course, since leakage is not related to - what? Yes, not related to current but to applied voltage.
OK, Mini, you have moisture infiltrating on the AC side of the Power Electronics Unit (PEU). My guess is either at the connector to grid power on the back drivers side, or under the hood at the PEU. It cannot be after the PEU because the voltage is always the same on that side, only the current changes. And we know that leakage is proportional to what? Right, the voltage.
Is it time for the big caulking gun? Maybe. Mini just needs to get it right on the production cars, I can deal with this. This car drives more confidently than any other car. Period. I can deal with slight lack of confidence in the charger.
Last night after a friend test drove #458, we had trouble getting it to continue charging again. I measured 252 volts at the contactor (not recommended for civilians) but it would not charge more than about 5 seconds. So I tried a tip from a very old posting on the Facebook discussion topics, I turned the car On and then Off. Eureka, it started charging just fine. (At 50 amps.)
OK, maybe it was coincidence. And Mini did respond to my email about this, saying they are looking into it.
So the problem is getting less severe for me, nine out of ten times it charges fine. And I have not had the red light on the wall box for a long time. I suspect we'll get to the bottom of it soon. I hope Mini gets it fixed before Michael with #269 gets too frustrated. Hang in there Michael!
OK, Mini did a fine job with the E but every prototype program has some rough edges. One thing they did not do well was HEAT. Maybe there is a kilowatt of waste heat from the motor and some could have been recovered for cabin heat. Maybe battery heat could have warmed the cabin instead of being vented outside. Maybe a reversible heat pump instead of the the AC pump could have warmed the cabin without so much impact on the range.OK, there is a new theory about the occasional problem getting the Mini E to start charging at 240 volts. The symptom I have seen is that the car starts charging but then stops after a few seconds. Once it starts and charges for more than 10 seconds then it was always good to get to 100% charge without intervention. But a week ago I often had to restart charging several times to get it to keep going. The 120 volt slow charger always worked.
Recently I have heard two reports of exactly this behavior when trying to charge from a generator. (I need to go back and ask if this was at 120 or 240 volts.) So maybe the AC Propulsion electronics are fussy about noise on the power line, or an imperfect sine wave from the power line, or maybe the two 120 volts legs that add up to 240 volts are not exactly the same magnitude?
Mini, is anyone looking into this?
I have not had trouble for a week now. Then again, the static I was getting on the radio at home is gone too. Maybe someone in the neighborhood was using some nasty power tools or a welder or something?
But this needs to be fixed before the production versions of electric cars come out next year.
Winter is coming and although I love driving the back roads to work, the hills can be dangerous when it is snowing hard.
So for a couple days I took the freeway round trip to work to see if I can make it. On Thursday I made it home with 10% left, but I hit all the lights and was at work (charging on the 120 volt cord) for maybe 9.5 hours. Friday I left a bit early so I only charged 7.3 hours and I didn't hit all the lights.
Coming home on I78 into NJ from PA, the highest point is a couple miles before exit 12, around my midway point. Knowing I had nearly 40 miles to go, I laughed when the miles remaining said 9. It is down hill now.
Over the next ten miles the remaining range indicator went UP 10 miles as I knew it would. I had never seen the "critically low" warning go off without charging from the wall box. But out it went, with 19 miles remaining. (By "critically low" I mean the warning that comes on below 10 miles remaining.)
Now I'm off the freeway. The miles remaining gauge is not going up any more, but it is not going down much either. For nearly another ten miles it almost holds steady.
At about ten miles from home, there is another minor peak in the Sourland Mountains, and my gauge hits zero. I laugh again. I know that there is about 10 miles left after zero although acceleration is limited. But of course, the needle starts creeping back up as I regenerate my way down the other side of the Sourlands. I got home at 3%.
Still, that is pretty tight but I know of at least 2 places of business that have let me plug in on the way home if I get in trouble. And that 10 miles after zero is reassuring.
But I have not used the heater much in days. We will see how long I can hold out as the weather gets colder.
I'll talk about my secret weapon, a low tech portable auxiliary heater, in future post. It costs only a few dollars, "recharges" in minutes, lasts for hours, but both driver and passenger need a separate one. And you might call it Dorky.
"Embrace your inner Dork, and let the Magic Begin!"
By the way, the shortest freeway route for me to work adds over ten miles versus the shortest back road route, but this route is still only about half on the freeway. It ends up around 136 miles round trip and only saves 5 or 10 minutes. I drive 55 (remember that?) and have not had much trouble from other driver since I stay in the right lane.
Several Mini E drivers have expressed range concerns due to colder weather in the North East and using the heater in the car. I have used an interior heater for years that I bought from Napa to preheat my cars so I don't idle them to warm them up, don't have to scrape the ice off, and don't freeze on the way to work while the antique combustion engine warmed up.Now I use it to increase my range in the Mini E. Here is a link to something similar to what I have:
Kat's Automotive Interior Heater 120 Volts #37100 $64.45
UPDATE: THE HEATER LISTED ABOVE IS DANGEROUSLY POOR QUALITY AND A FIRE HAZARD. DON'T BUY IT! See new posting here.
My particular model might not be available anymore. It draws 6.75 amps, or about 825 watts, the rating is 900 watts as is the link above. I plug it in when I get up in the morning and by the time I am ready to leave the car can be pretty warm, usually over 80 degrees F. When the weather gets colder I will probably go back to using a timer to turn it on before I get up. Preheating the cabin lets me run without any heat for the first ten miles or so, and then use a lower setting than I would have.
I have added cabin temperature to my logs, as well as heater settings. The link is over to the right under "#458 trip log only". Sorry about the confusing layout of the spread sheet, I'll rearrange it someday. Recent entries are at the bottom, unlike these blogs.
Mini says they don't want accessories installed, so I have my heater sitting in a steel pan that is meant for baking bread. It holds the heater at a safe angle and allows it to be positioned such that it won't melt anything like seats or the dash board. There is a thermal cutoff switch and maybe another safety feature in mine, I hope the link I found is as well equipped but I don't know, it is just a suggestion. The instructions for mine explicitly say it should be screwed down in such and such a fashion, and I have put the required mounting in my GM car. Maybe can move it to the Mini, I'll have to check with the service guys for permission.
And don't underestimate the power of taking hot drinks on your drive to increase your battery range. Liquids are also good for your immune system during flu season. And you can often run the heater at a much lower setting.
The rain here lately has put a stop to using the recirculate button to reduce the heat setting. Others have observed this causes the windows to fog up. I doubt that using the AC and the heater would use less power than turning off the recirculate. That would be interesting to try to measure...
But I do have to make some more measurements on heater power consumption. If someone else doesn't post it first, I am going to park the Mini E in the cold with the heater on at maximum, windows partly open, and time how long it takes to draw the battery from 100% down to 30% or less. Probably at fan setting 2 to start, although I rarely have to use more than the lowest fan setting after preheating.
Was anyone besides me expecting Mini to have used a heat pump instead of a resistive heating element? Too bad, but maybe it is not practical yet.
Mini E #458 came home from service today. They said at first that maybe the charging problem was the wall box, but then they found a trouble code so they replaced the big brass colored box under the hood again, like they did a couple months ago.
Except this time we get it home and still have trouble getting it to start charging. The charging light on the dash board blinks a couple times and then it stops.
So I suspect the contactors in the safety box on the wall have gotten crusty or something. Turning the car down to 12 amps makes it keep charging. Then after it has been blinking steadily for more than 12 times, it can be set back to 50 amps and it will keep going until it reaches 100%.
The portable 120 volt 12 amp charger was always a bit finicky, sometimes it would take a couple tries to get it to start charging. For several weeks that is all we had. When the big wall box came, at first would always start the car charging immediately and keep going. Now it is the big wall box that is finicky.
Good to get all this ironed out before there are millions of electric cars on the road. That is what us "pioneers" (as Mini calls us) are here for.
I heard that since contacts cannot be plated with cadmium or other nasty materials anymore, it is harder to make high current relays reliable. Maybe I have an example. But good relays can be made, the just cost more now, or have to sealed better, or whatever.
Maybe my little experiment awhile back running the battery way down weakened some of the battery modules? We will know soon. The "flying doctors" at the dealer are good, I'm sure they will fix it pronto. And I'm sure the production electric vehicles to come will not have this issue. Which is why we are doing this, after all. For the future! (Can you tell we are having fun?)
Update: I recently found several more blogs from other Mini E drivers (I hope I have them all linked on the right side now) and I read that several others have run the battery "below zero". Nobody mentioned ill effects from it. So I assume that my charging issue (which mysteriously disappeared for a few days) is unrelated. Service appointment was postponed until tomorrow...
A few days ago I posted results from running the battery way down past zero. And then I charged it over night at 12 amps with the big 240 volt charger.
It took about 12 hours to go from zero to 100%. This is much less than half of the charge time at 120 volt 12 amps, which I measured at well over 30 hours back in the heat of summer. See an older post.
But it is cooler now, and the battery fan runs much slower. I suspect that is the major difference.
One of these days I will analyze my log file (now posted in with the blog links on the right) and see if I am getting noticeably more juice into the battery at work in this cooler weather. But I can't do it right now, I am spending too much time driving my Mini E.
By the way, I am noticing some trouble getting the Mini E to start charging from the 240 volt big box when the car is set for 12 amps. Sometimes it starts and stops, and I have to pull out the plug and put it back in, sometimes twice. At first I thought that was because I had run the battery down so far in the experiment a few posts back. But now I notice it even when the battery is above 25%. Maybe it has always been like this, and I only noticed it with the small 120 volt charger that can only be used at 12 amps. It is only recently that I have started just leaving the car set for 12 amps almost all the time because it usually charges fast enough overnight to reach 100% by morning. The idea is to draw most of the power late at night when the grid load is low.
Today I heard that I will not get one of the left over charging stations to install at work since I work in Pennsylvania, and the Mini E program is only setup to supervise charge station installations in NJ, NY, and CA. Fine, I understand.So it is time to see what happens when you drive a Mini E well past zero.
In a previous post I noted that it can take awhile to actually get the gauge to stay at zero. When it first reaches zero, it tends to bounce back up as high as +3% when regenerative braking is used or just when standing at a stop light.
Tonight I purposely kept driving past the point at which the gauge stays at zero. With the heater running. Just driving around the block by my house.
I got almost another ten miles as the maximum power slowly declined. There is not a road speed limit per se as the charge drops below zero, but a torque limit that gets greater. So you can still go fairly fast on level road or downhill, but I got to the point where a moderate hill limited me to 15 mph.
The real issue is that it doesn't want to start charging when it has been driven well below zero. I finally pulled out the 120 volt portable charger, and it would accept charge from that. After a few minutes charging at 120 volts, the car would accept 240 volts at 12 amps. Then I bumped it up to 32 amps. No problem. A few minutes more and I bumped up to 50 amps. OK. But it was almost ten minutes before the gauge went above 0%.
Also, the charge gauge needle never drops below zero while driving. That range between Zero and Off is not a "negative zone". It just makes it clear when the car is on or off. The digital gauge never shows negative either.
So I am not worried about shorter range in the approaching winter. I can make do with the 120 volt charger at work. My 120 mile commute has usually left me with 20 miles of range when I get home after also charging at work with the little box. And I can get over 30 miles left when I arrive home if I am careful. So as the heater gets used and colder weather reduces the range a bit, I'll be fine. Now I know there is another ten miles in there if something goes wrong. I hope I never have to use it again though.
Four hours of only headlights on consumed 3% of charge.I don't think we need to worry about headlights reducing the range noticeably.
Running the fan at its lowest speed with the heater at maximum for 1:55 drew the charge meter down 9%. I don't expect to need max heat often, so I suspect I'll have enough range this winter. My drive is typically around 1:35, and I have often preheated my cars in the morning during winter with a 900 watt automotive electric heater. So I probably won't need heat the whole drive.
I took the measurements this morning with the car fully charged, windows open and in the garage. Ambient temperature in the garage started at 62 degrees F, same as cabin temperature. After the one hour and 55 minute test, the ambient temperature read 65 and the cabin was 79.
Mini announced a while back that there are some extra high power chargers available for lessees to install at work, now that all the high power chargers have been installed at the homes of lessees. I use the low power portable charger at work and have always had a comfortable margin of range for my 3+ hour commute, even in the hot weather where I was running the AC a lot. But I don't know about the winter when aerodynamic resistance increases, rolling resistance increases, batteries get "stiff" and the heater is on.
At this rate of heater power consumption, I'm not worried. But it will be nice if they grant me a second charger. But if they don't, I will deal with it. I am driving the Mini E this winter, whatever it takes. I expect it will not be a problem, since everything else has performed as expected or better.
I tried making measurements a couple weeks back using the "Amp Hours per 100 miles" reading on the dash board. There is too much filtering however, so I could not get numbers that looked trustworthy. My method was to zero all the gauges, coast in neutral down a small hill for 0.1 miles and then run the heater or AC for ten minutes. If it worked, it would have given a result in less time. I'll make some more readings with the longer method described at the beginning, but at different heater settings and post them later.
A couple weeks back we had some very wet weather again in New Jersey. I recall reports of seven inches in one day in my county. I was out driving #458 in some of the heaviest rain on the weekend without any problems. I admit it is a curious feeling to pull in the garage out of rain so hard that visibility is down to a few car lengths, and then plug into a charging box that puts out 16 horsepower at 240 volts. Again, no problem. Big grin on my face.
(You know, it takes about as much time to plug in this car at home as it does to plug in my mobile phone, which I also do when I get home. But I never spend any time at the gas station. Another big grin.)
Then on the following Monday it was still raining and I went to work on the low roads along the Delaware river again. Lots of big puddles. Not a single problem. Even when I hit puddles too fast that were bigger than I thought.
I know I sound like a stuck record but we really like this car. I hope they hurry up and put something like it up for sale. I cannot imagine a Nissan being this nice. But we won't ever buy a piston car again if there is anything close to this available.
.bmp)
If I may digress, I am very suspicious of the talk about the "A" word regarding range in electric cars, and I would really like to see us proponents stop repeating it. Keep in mind that there is always a propaganda machine at work trying to undermine any alternatives to petroleum. Economics 101 says that without alternatives, there is no downward pressure on prices. Petroleum has had a monopoly in transport fuels for a long time, and they will say anything to keep it. So don't repeat the "A" word. Nissan was very smart to use the term range awareness, which I have chosen to follow.
You can probably remember a time when you were young and ran out of gas, right? (Maybe not so young.) Most of use have not done that since. Well, you probably had some anxiety when that happened and ever since you paid attention to the gauges and gas stations and you have been sanguine about your range. There is not much different with an electric car except that if you do run out of charge, you get warning and you slow down gradually. And there are literally about a billion places you can plug in your car if you have the social skills to ask. I have plugged in at a super market, a small local grocery, at work every day, and I have spotted lots of retail locations with outdoor outlets where I could ask if I ran short. Sure it charges slowly at 120 volts. But lets drop the "A" word, OK? Don't play into the hands of the petroleum monopoly.
And Electro Magnetic Compatibility issues like this can be pretty easy to fix. Or not. I have seen issues that take down the entire CAN communication bus, now that was serious. But there was a very simple fix.
I have other comments about the radio but I want to limit this blog to observations that are specific to the electric only version, and I suspect the radio is common with the piston versions of the Mini. Plus, I have not read the manual for the radio yet and I don't want to make a fool out of myself. Yet.
UPDATE: It seems the EMI from the defroster is intermittent, maybe there is a loose wire and not a design issue. This is not worth a trip to the dealer, certainly not in warm weather. The occassional fog lately is something I can live with without using the defroster. When we go on vacation I'll drop it off for them to look into.
I have to digress from the theme of this blog and move from the quantitative to the qualitative.
The reason this car is such a wonderful ride is the gestalt of less noise, less vibration, less smell, less heat, and less guilt about the fuel source. Being someone who occasionally falls into the trap of 'road rage', I can testify that driving this electric car has a salutary effect that mollifies the tendency towards aggression and makes it easy to take one's time.
I do not expect those that have to drive in NYC or LA to experience this effect, with the over riding pressure of those environments. But combined with the opportunity to drive on county roads with low traffic, this car has convinced me that I am never going back to piston power if I can avoid it. Do not misunderstand, I loved driving on biodiesel for years and in the short term it might even be better environmentally than the nuclear based electric power here in New Jersey. But it does not have the multidimensional luxury of electric power. And of course electric power can move to solar and wind, I just don't have those options immediately. Soon maybe.
I have heard that when the first flush toilet was installed in the White House, it was a novelty. Most people had outhouses, which got the job done but they were uncomfortable, stinky, not so healthy and not so good for the environment.
Today, electric cars are a novelty. Piston cars cars get the job done but they are uncomfortable, stinky, not so healthy and not so good for the environment nor for geopolitical stability.
OK, to take the metaphor to the limit, I would be in a hurry if I were still driving around in the automotive equivalent of an outhouse. But I'm not. I'm driving a Mini E. And I love it. I admit that in the best of all possible worlds we would not need cars. At the moment I do need a car, and I'll take the metaphorical equivalent of a flush toilet over an outhouse, even if it is more expensive.
My wife was skeptical about this car at first, mostly due to the cost. But she realized that with my ridiculously long commute, there was value in reducing my driving stress. She is hooked now too. Though my wife NEVER liked to drive, now she grabs the key fob and heads for the driver's door of the Mini E, while I follow to the passenger's door. And she has started to complain about her car.
The second time we came home from church in the Mini E, my wife said "When the lease runs out on this car, it is going to be very sad". I knew she was hooked.
I have to get a windows sticker made, saying "Pistons? We don't need no stinking pistons!"
