Mini E #458

Think City EV available in Baltimore Marlyland (updated)

2011-09-26T21:07:00.001-04:00

I heard today that www.cleancities.com has three colors of the Think City EV in stock in Balitmore, just not the yellow one pictured above. They have Blue, Red, and Black, but of course the Yellow was pulled from production with pigmentation issues. Contact info from the Clean Cities web site:

1206 Ridgely Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
Map & Directions

Tel: 410.528.0150
Toll Free: 800.922.7999

There was a story about two weeks ago in Green Car Reports that the Clean Cities Coalition in Syracuse NY was offering Think City EVs for sale in central New York. ~~I don't know if this group is related to the Baltimore operation, the web sites do not appear to be related.~~ The Syracuse and Baltimore operators know each other but have 'No contract or grant' relationship, if I understand. It seems to me that have have not just a similar name, but also similar goals.

~~I was only able to get limited confirmation by email today. They sounded pretty busy and then later it appeared that their web page had been updated, so maybe that was what they were doing.~~ I got several questions answered today: 1) They will sell out of state. 2) The car is eligible for the $7500 Federal tax incentive. Clean Cities (dot com) appears to be a small business with a long history in EVs and NEVs. I get the impression they are able to ship out of state but I am not certain. They say pricing matches the factory website, www.thinkev-usa.com

We are approaching 4000 miles in our blue Think City EV that we ordered last April directly from the factory in Indiana, before the bankruptcy. It looks like Think is getting back on their feet, so to say. Cheers!

It is interesting to consider that Think built their 2500th vehicle just under a year ago. The big names that have entered the market are just recently passing that mark with highway capable EVs.

And yes, the Think City EV goes 70 mph.

GE WattStation works intermittently with my Th!nk City EV

2011-09-19T21:56:00.002-04:00

General Electric (GE) has started manufacturing "Electric Vehicle Service Equipment" (or EVSEs) in North Carolina. These are often informally called EV charging stations or something similar. One of the units pictured above is installed and working in front of the GE factory along Interstate highway 40/85 just west of exit 158, east of Mebane NC (6801 Industrial Drive Mebane NC 27302-8603).

Several more are installed but not wired as of yesterday. This might explain why GE has not listed them yet, not even on GE's locator page much less on the NREL alt fuel locator page.

But "working" is a relative term in this case. While I was able to charge from this station a couple months ago (when it was installed on the far side of the sidewalk next to the parking spot), it has since been moved closer to the parking area and I was not able to charge from it yesterday. A Tesla, which was also at GE yesterday, had no trouble charging from this EVSE. (Well, the Tesla tripped the circuit breaker feeding the EVSE, because the breaker needs to be increased from 30 to 40 amps for a 32 amp EVSE like this one. Once the Tesla was set back to 24 amps, it charged fine.) And there were reports of a Leaf and a Volt being able to charge there recently. But both of those EVs max out at 16 amps, I believe.

After several attempts, we got the Th!nk to start charging once by inserting the connector very slowly, but we could not repeat it. The GE WattStation uses the Yazaki brand J1772 plug, while the EVSE that came with my Th!nk has the IIT Cannon brand plug, which works fine with my Th!nk.

I have heard several reports of incompatibility between Leafs and Blink charging stations, if I recall. I hope I can help GE get to the bottom of this issue soon. We need as many reliable EVSE out there as possible, regardless of the manufacturer. I have yet to find a Blink EVSE in my area.

By the way, I did not have any trouble charging the Th!nk from the AeroVironment EVSE at the local Nissan dealer. While I have charged at many places, I usually bring my own EVSE and plug into a conventional outlet. I have two Clipper Creek EVSEs (one for 120 volts, and a large 240 volt unit) and my now favorite 240 volt portable EVSE made by Th!nk in Europe, which has a button on the front to change settings from 12 to 16 amps. It looks just like a black version of the portable Clipper Creek EVSE except for the button and labels.

Another EV arrives in North Carolina

2011-09-11T15:58:00.000-04:00

This last week, Nissan dealers in my area started receiving demonstrator models of the Leaf EV. My wife and I took test drive this morning, and we both had favorable impressions of the Leaf.

Of course, you probably cannot get a Leaf until next year unless you ordered some time ago. Heck, it is not easy to get a Think City EV at the moment either, unless you live in Indiana. (I am not sure what is going on with Think since they came out of bankruptcy, but I will be patient and post about that later.)

While the Leaf is more of a "conventional" car than the Think, I am not sure that is an unqualified advantage. And while the Leaf is nicely appointed inside, it is not what my wife nor I would call cute. I would not expect to get asked about it were I to drive one, the way I constantly get asked about the Think City EV. Some would call the Think insufferably cute, although it is a matter of taste. I have even given rides to car dealers when I was dropping of the old gas car for service and my wife picked me up in the Think. Usually the customer gets a test drive, but the Think is so iconic that sometimes the car salesman ask for a ride in the customer's car! The Nissan dealer was all over my Think this morning, though we did not have time to give him a ride. Of course I charged the Think at the Nissan dealer while test driving the Leaf.

As a 4 seat car, the Leaf has good leg room in the rear. The trunk space is reasonable but nothing near the cavernous space in the back of the 2 seat Think. The Leaf is a bit more powerful than the Think and a bit quieter. Range and charging time are very similar. (The Leaf that our dealer had was not equipped with the fast charge port, and he was of the opinion that a fast charge station was not going to be installed at his dealership.) Obviously the Leaf is much larger than the Think. That cuts both ways. If you have kids at home, the Think is probably not for you. If you don't have kids at home, the fantastic maneuverability and visibility of the Think EV is addictive.

No wasted space under the hood of a Think City EV

After spending some time looking under the hood of the Leaf (sorry, I forgot to take pictures) I had the renewed impression that the Leaf platform was not designed exclusively as an EV, there is plenty of wasted space under the hood. It could be much shorter, giving better visibility particularly around tight urban corners. There are routes we take in town only when we are in the Think EV, because in our gas car (with a hood as long as the Leaf's hood) it is just too hard to see around some corners without getting your front dangerously out into traffic. And Think did this without sacrificing crash safety. The strength of the metal cage protecting the passenger compartment was one of the primary reasons that Ford purchased Think back in the late 1990s. (As we all know, after the California Air Resources Board dropped its EV mandate in the early 2000's, GM crushed their EV1s and Ford sold Think.)

I am reminded of the electronics of the last century, which tended to be treated as furniture. Big stereos and TVs with big wooden cabinets were the norm for decades. Today, the norms are much smaller, flat screens take up much less space even when the viewing area is much larger. This is similar in a way to how the Think EV is small on the outside but big on the inside, since it was never compromised to also be able to package a combustion engine. And even though we tend to have large flat screen TVs these days, we more and more tend to watch tiny screens that can fit in our pockets, or maybe a small laptop screen. The most common cars in the mega cities of the future may well follow this same trend towards smaller, more efficient packaging that still leaves plenty of interior room due to the flexibility of electric only drive power.

But the two biggest reasons why I still prefer the Think over the Leaf are the Think's plastic body panels and very accurate battery gauge. After 15 years in a Saturn with plastic body panels that still look great, I have no desire to go back to a tin can car that looks great the day you drive it off the lot, and then starts to look ratty after a few years unless you pamper it. (I pamper my wife, I beat on my cars. And both look great.) The very first time I saw a Chevy Volt was about 6 weeks ago, and it already had a huge dent in it. My Think does not dent easily at all.

But the battery gauge is the worst part of the Leaf. Sure, it looks snazzy, but it only has 12 bars. The Think has a very accurate needle gauge with about 1% resolution. After putting 24,000 miles on my Mini E in one year, I was the king of arriving home at 0% on the battery gauge. You cannot do that and remain sanguine when your battery gauge has only 9% resolution. There are hacks posted on the forums showing how to build a more accurate battery gauge which plugs into the Leaf's diagnostic port. I am sure that detracts from the nicely appointed interior of the Leaf. Maybe Nissan will fix the battery gauge next year.

In the meantime, I am very happy to see more EVs arriving on the market in North Carolina. The Leaf will obviously have wider appeal in the short term than the Think, but I remain extremely happy after buying a Think. And, buying a Think put me in an EV about a year sooner than I could have if I had waited for a Leaf.

In this little neighborhood, we have my Think City EV and a Tesla owner who lives a few miles away, the Smart dealer in the next town over has offered the Smart Electric Drive for many months now (not sure how many takers there have been) and now the Leaf is in town (at least for test drives.) Very soon the Chevy Volt will be arriving, perhaps this month. What is that, five production EVs in the area soon? I can't wait to see more choices. The Mitsubishi iMiEV and the Ford Focus EV are hopefully coming next year.

North Carolina is EV friendly

2011-09-04T00:19:00.004-04:00

During the past few months I have given rides in my Think City EV (which does not have decals) to dozens of people, and talked with many more people about my Think when they ask about it in a parking lot. Maybe this is due to the striking appearance of the Think, which many people guess at first to be a Fiat. Perhaps part of it is just that people in North Carolina are generally friendly.

So to some extent, I have not been posting on this blog recently because of the amount of time I have spent doing "EV evangelizing" with local people in person.

As further evidence of how friendly people are here (and perhaps friendly in particular to EVs) I have yet to be turned down when looking for a place to plug in. Currently I have plugged in at four businesses, a church and a friend's home when driving the Think EV outside of my home town. One way or another I am able to get 240 volts at all these locations, even though only one has a built-in EVSE available. I will post more about how I do that later, although there are lots of hints in older posts when I used a messier process.

This makes it rather easy to regularly make a 140 mile social trip in one day, even though our Think City has a best case 100 mile range.

Why the Th!nk is a great car

2011-05-31T19:41:00.005-04:00

We had some heavy rains in parts of the state recently. There is always a report of someone driving into deep water, getting water sucked into the cylinders, and breaking a connecting rod. Well, you should never drive into deep water but it is nice to know that it won't break anything in the Th!nk. They tested it. 400 volts? No problem. But seriously, don't try this in any car.

Quoting from Th!nk's US web site: "THINK City has been put through extensive testing and validation, including hundreds of computer simulations, over 50 sled tests and more than 20 full-vehicle crash tests. Comprehensive electrical testing and validation have also been conducted over extended periods, including deep-water wading and total submergence in salt water with all electrical systems activated."

There is also lots of little stuff I like.

The air conditioning is powerful. We had 98 degrees F today (37 C) and we were very comfortable in the Think EV without turning up the AC all the way.

The horn is righteously loud, and has two tones. (I believe the musical interval produced by the horns is a fifth.) No one ignores the Th!nk when it honks at them. Not your typical small car "beep".

The settings of the dash board controls can all be distinguished by feel, you do not have to take your eyes off the road to check where the fan is, if the AC is on, etc. The controls on the Mini E mostly required a glance to figure out where they were set, which I find to be a safety concern.

The 12 volt outlet works when the car is turned off, making it easy to slow-charge the 12 volt accessory battery without jumper cables. This should never be needed, but I heard a story on the radio just last weekend where a Prius owner needed to charge his 12 volt battery and could not even find it. Most Japanese cars do not keep the 12 volt outlet active when the car is off. If I recall, the Mini E did not either.

The center of gravity is very low since the batteries are under the seats. It will take corners very fast with out a complaint. The handling is very good in my humble opinion. And although it is not nearly as fast as the Mini E, everyone I take for a drive comments on the great acceleration.

I like the recirculate button since it will stay on as long as I want it on. This was one of the MOST annoying things about the Mini E. We were in traffic today with some smoky cars. I turned on the air recirculation so we did not have to smell them. My car pool coworker said, "This car does not Stink, this car is a Think!" (Not bad for some one who's first language is not English.) Of course you should not leave the recirculate on forever, fresh air is good when available.

Absolutely reliable charging. I have charged the Th!nk dozens of times and I have never had to restart charging or come back to find the car stopped charging before the battery was at 100%. I don't know about other Mini E drivers, but I probably had to try again one out of five times when charging at 120 volts in the Mini E. And of course the problems charging the Mini E at 245 volts and above were very widespread. (To be fair, I have not setup for 240 volt charging with the Th!nk yet. And I am sure BMW will not make that mistake again.)

I like other mundane stuff like huge cargo space (the Mini E had very little), excellent rear visibility such as you have never seen, long life no rust no dent no scratch plastic body panels (with the "Blue Suede Shoes" look), essentially no maintenance (well, I still need to clean the windows sometimes), 2.1 cents per mile to charge the battery compared to gasoline costs that can be ten times higher, no support to OPEC but support to other American Energy Workers like coal miners or nuclear workers or hydro/wind/solar whatever. I like that it is a car assembled in America with an American Made battery from an American owned company, OK I will stop now.

I am loving it, can you tell?

Ah, but my wife called the Th!nk EV "the ersatz 458" recently. She still misses the Mini E. So do I. But we don't miss the lease payments!!

One more thing. The Th!nk has all the gauges you need and nothing more. No unreliable "miles remaining" estimate that only makes people nervous. No battery temperature, just a better quality battery and cooling system than the Mini E had. Yeah yeah, I can hear some of you saying that more information is better. Maybe not when you are driving. How did that song go? "Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel! The future's uncertain and the end is always near."

OK, I promise to never quote Jim Morrison again. I promise.

100 mile range at moderate speeds as advertised by Th!nk, 96% charging efficiency

2011-05-22T15:20:00.007-04:00

We drove one hundred miles on a single charge yesterday in our new Th!nk City EV. The low battery light came on at about 99.5 miles, and the gauge indicated several miles of range left, perhaps just under 10.

Most of this drive was done on back roads at speeds of 45 mph, but with many stops going through small towns. We used the air conditioning for about 25 miles, I guess. The usual EV driving technique of trying to slow down only with regenerative braking is instinctive for me after 25,000 miles driving the Mini E. However, it takes a bit more care in the Th!nk since the regen is not as strong as the Mini E regen. This technique is essential to getting the best range in an EV of course. And it makes a noticeable difference in gas cars as well, it is just not as noticeable since efficiency of gas cars is so very low to start with.

I plan to test the range again on the freeway in the Economy mode, which is 60 mph top speed, and hopefully later in the Drive mode, which has 70 mph as the top speed.

On this trip I took a Garmin GPS which indicated that my Th!nk City EV reads a little high on the speedometer, just like my wife's Honda. At 59 mph on the speedometer, the GPS says 55. While my wife's Honda has the exact same speed offset, my old Mercedes 240D read even higher, almost 7 mph off at 65 mph. However my Saturn agrees precisely with the Garmin.

Recharging the Th!nk after my 100 mile trip consumed 23.6 kwh, a bit less than the 24 kwh specified to charge fully from zero. Perhaps this is because I stopped when the low battery light came on, and I had several miles of range left. This agrees with Th!nk's claim of 96% charging efficiency. See slide #12 at this link, original source is here if you can open a PDF file.

Charge time agrees closely with the Frequently Asked Questions on the Th!nk website. They claim 18 hours for a full charge from 110 volts. I measured 19 hours 19 minutes.

The bottom line is that the Th!nk adds about 5.2 miles of range per hour when charging at 116 volts, versus about 3 miles of range per hour of charging at 110 volts for the Mini E.

This high charging efficiency is a significant advantage over the Mini E which in my experience took over 30 hours to fully charge from 120 volts, even though they claimed 24 hours. (At work, I could only charge the Mini E at 110 volts, there was no 208 volt supply available to me until near the end of the lease.) The Mini E battery pack is only about 16% larger than the Th!nk battery, so most of this difference is in charging efficiency. I do not believe this is AC Propulsion's fault, I suspect it has more to do with poor BMW decisions like running the battery cooling fans during charging even if they are not needed. (Keep in mind the Mini E is a prototype.) As I found out, this can be a fatal flaw when charging the Mini E outside in the winter unless you put a cabin heater in the Mini E. The Th!nk should have no such problem. In addition, the battery temperature range of the Ener Del battery pack is wider, on both the hot and cold extremes.

To be fair, the Mini E charging efficiency appeared to be much better at 220 volts, presumably because the parasitic fan power is a smaller percentage of the total.

The older fourth generation Th!nk reported had a charging efficiency of about 64%, consuming 18 kwh to fully charge the 11.5 kwh NiCad battery. Nice that our generation 5 Th!nk has more than twice the battery capacity and roughly 50% more efficient charging. But I do miss the 12 kw charge rate available in the Mini E, even if I did not use it much. The 3.8 kw charger in the Th!nk is a limitation for long trips.

Th!nk City EV is shipping in Norway again

2011-05-19T22:59:00.001-04:00

I hear from Tom in Oslo that deliveries have restarted to Th!nk showrooms in Norway. Th!nk builds the City EV in Finland for the Euro market, and they use a different power connector, not the SAE J1772 standard used in the US version of the Th!nk.

This is interesting since apparently the Japanese EVs showing up in Norway do use the J1772 connector. The battery is also different in the Euro version of the Th!nk, it is not the 24 kwh Lithium Ion battery from Ener Del that we get in the US. I'll save the details on the Euro version until later.

I will get around to interior photos later, but here is one photo, with the Th!nk City EV Interior Designer Katinka von der Lippe sitting in the car:

Correction, I am told that the Ener Del Lithium Ion battery is now available in Norway, in addition to the Zebra sodium battery.

Th!nk is more conspicuous than Mini E

2011-05-17T18:16:00.000-04:00

I never had anyone stop me in the Mini E to ask about it. But the Th!nk EV stands out a bit more.

Today, in the rain, someone got out two cars ahead of me at a stop light and ran back to give me a phone number. They wanted to know more about the EV.

Another tidbit I learned today: while the car can sustain 70 mph, the road speed limit does not completely cut power until 75 mph going down hill. A lot of blogs are claiming a top speed of 60, which is only in Economy mode.

I don't have enough miles to comment much on range yet, except that 100 seems easy off the freeway. And the range appears less elastic than the Mini E, simply because there is less power to waste.

Lots of cargo

2011-05-15T22:26:00.004-04:00

This might not mean much to you if you have never driven a Mini E, which has no back seat. But here is a photo of five suitcases in the back of the Think City EV. Most of these suitcases are very large.

Our Think EV does not have a back seat either but it does have a lot of room, unlike the Mini E. Here is another view with the suitcases outside the car.

For those unfamiliar, the Mini E is a prototype car for research. The entire back seat is taken up by batteries. When we took the Mini E on long trips, we had to add a roof rack. Pictures are here. The storage space in the Mini E is perhaps comparable to the Smart ED, although nothing much else is comparable.
(We had to give the Mini E back when we moved to NC. It is not supported here.)

The Think City EV was designed from the ground up as an EV, with the batteries under the seats. So there is about a cubic yard of cargo space in the back of this two seater.

And the seats in our fifth generation Think EV can lean all the way back when the back is not completely full of suitcases.

Now that I mention it, the best part is that they cannot take the Think EV away from us if we move! We own it, unlike the Mini E which was only leased. (You cannot get it in the US anymore.)

Back in the EV saddle

2011-05-14T11:58:00.006-04:00

We received our Think EV yesterday. This is generation 5, for those in Europe who have had access to earlier Think EV models for decades.

For those of you who are on long waiting lists to get an EV from a competitor with less experience in EVs, hear this: It took about 3 days from the time I wired the money to Think in Indiana until the time it arrived at our driveway in NC. Depending on how far you are from Indiana, it might vary. Ours arrived in a covered straight truck and was off-loaded locally to a flat bed.

We have only put about 30 miles on it so far, but it seems a little better than the model I test drove outside of Indianapolis a few weeks ago. I suspect the demo I drove had the software set for a slightly lower top speed according to Euro standards, but ours has a top speed slightly over 70 mph on flat roads.

It is too soon to tell for sure, but my first impression is that the Think is a bit more comfortable than the Mini E which had rather stiff seats. I once drove Grandma from Long Island NY down to central New Jersey in the Mini E and she refused to ride in it again because of the hard seats. (Funny, she is 100% German but all this time in the US must have made her soft.)

Another first impression is that it has better handling, which surprises me. Not that the Mini E was not fun to drive, but it took me weeks of driving over 600 miles per week to feel comfortable with the "twitchy" Mini E steering. I am not a car geek, so I cannot talk about over-steer or whatever. But the Think feels completely comfortable to drive from the get go.

Visibility out the back window is amazing if the car is empty. They say in defensive driving classes that backing up is one of the most dangerous things you can do. I believe it is much less so in the Think. No need at all for a backup camera when unloaded.

Of course the Think has a lot less power than the Mini E, which is fine with me. The Think has adequate power, and I always felt the Mini E had too much. And the built-in Think charger is wimpy, as are the built-in chargers in most of this generation of EVs such as the Leaf and the Volt. But since my commute is down from 600 miles per week to 80 miles, that is not a problem for me.

At low speeds the Think is not as quiet as the Mini E. I believe I hear the vacuum pump and the power steering, which I was told is electrically driven hydraulic. So there is no need for some type of audible warning for pedestrians. (Which I feel is ridiculous anyway, and just an oblique attempt to undermine EVs.)

On the highway, the road noise might be even less than the Mini E while the motor whir is noticeable at 70 mph. But I do not take the freeway much anymore. Years ago I found I preferred to drive back roads instead of the freeway. This happened long before I had a chance to drive on biodiesel, which I did for several years before the Mini E, and very long before I had a chance to get into an EV.

So my first impression is that the Think is pretty close to perfect for my needs. It costs about $4000 less than it would to lease the Smart EV for 4 years, and the Think should easily last 6 times longer than the Smart EV lease.

The rear storage is huge, I will post photos later.

I see a lot of misinformation in the major EV blogs about Ener1 writing off their investment in Think. And a lot of misinformation generally about Think. I may comment on that in detail later, but suffice it to say for now that it makes me wonder if the main stream EV blogs are not really just shills for the major car companies who are trying to get into the EV business and distract from their inexperience and even downright recent animosity towards EVs.

My main attraction to the Think over competitors is domestic content (the battery in made in the US by a US company, which is still supplying Think regardless of changes in the mutual investments), domestic assembly and no rust plastic body panels.

But the overwhelming consideration was immediate availability. I was not willing to wait up to another year for an EV from a less experienced EV maker while paying nearly $4 a gallon for gasoline. What is that new movie called, "Gashole"? That about sums it up.

To be fair, my wife is more skeptical about the Think, due to the motor whir at speed. Well, she also really misses Mini E 458. So do I. But no more pouting when we see Minis on the road. We are back in the EV saddle again!

Public charge station maps

2011-04-04T22:26:00.000-04:00

Sorry if this is old news to some of you, but as I approach getting another electric car I am starting to pay attention to recent developments. One is the updated maps of public charging stations.

Coulomb Technologies Charge Point network has a nice interface. They don't list anything in my town yet but there are lots nearby.

As you zoom in there is more detail of course

There is talk about the Google maps direct search but it does not have this level of detail as far as I could tell, and it is uncharacteristically fussy about the wording of your query.

But the best is probably the Alternative Fuels Locater:

Think EV now available in North America, updated 18 April 2011

2011-04-04T21:01:00.005-04:00

I spoke with Tim Hylen from Think today, tim dot hylen at thinkev dot com

Currently the Think EV bottom line is $28995 after the $7500 federal tax credit but before any local incentives, of which I have none in NC. (MSRP is $36,495 and qualifies for the $7,500 Federal Tax Credit.) One data sheet is here, and range data is here. The press release from Finland in 2010 is here.

People living within 100 miles of Indianapolis or Elkhart Indiana have significant additional local incentives, on the order of $9,000. The details are here. As I live in NC, this does not help me.

The Think EV has an air cooled battery that draws outside air, allowing the recirculation button in the cabin to stay on, unlike the Mini E. However, there is no battery heater. I don't see a problem for me, since I live at latitude 36.1 degrees north and I have a garage to park in. Still I have some questions about cold weather charging performance of the EnerDel batteries.

Tim told me that the cabin heater uses a liquid, so I expect it will be more reliable than the notorious Mini E cabin heater which is completely unreliable.

I consider the plastic body panels to be a significant advantage, suggesting the car might outlast me. The first recommended service is at 40,000 miles for brake pads. I prefer local content for the same reason that I pay a premium for local vegetables. And being the batteries are a significant part of the cost of the car, I really like that they are made in Indiana.

I don't like the internal charger that is apparently 3.3 kw. Tim said that EnerDel is working on a level 3 connection but there is no time line on availability.

I really like the huge cargo capacity in back, quite a change from the Mini E. The four seat option that is available in Europe does not have a time line for US introduction according to Tim.

Think is using Tom Woods Subaru in Indianapolis for service, but I gather that Tim handles sales directly for now while they ramp up. I expect to meet him at Tom Woods for a test drive in a few weeks. Tim indicated that the car can be shipped to me, and even the paper work can be done remotely.

The Think has enough range to get from my home to Raleigh NC and back in an afternoon, as long as I can find 240 volts to charge from for a couple hours while I'm there. I cannot say this of the Smart ED which is already available locally, but leases for $600 per month over 4 years, in addition to something like $4200 down up front. The Smart ED does have liquid thermal management for the battery, but not enough range for my weekend needs. Even the Think would have a hard time getting to Charlotte and back in the same day, due to it's limited charge rate. But I have not yet had a reason to go that far on the weekends.

Tim said the HVAC could run while the car was plugged in but there is no remote control for this. I plan to confirm that when I test drive it.

And, the Think comes with a Clipper Creek level 1 EVSE, unlike the Nissan supplied 120 volt interface that reportedly does not fully comply with SAE J1772 safety features such as diode load to enable charging. I am quite confident that Clipper Creek fully complies.

I strongly expect that the Think will have better range estimation than the Leaf, which has reportedly left a couple drivers stranded when the gauge went from 30 miles remaining to dead in the space of a mile or two. Think has been selling electric cars for 20 years on and off.

All in all the Think strikes me a rather comparable to the Mini E technology wise, albeit with a much lower power output which I don't mind, and a much lower charge rate which I do mind. But with significant domestic content, superior plastic body panels, and probably a much better cabin heater it might be good enough. I would not consider the Leaf with the reports I have heard that leave me wondering what other corners they cut. The only question is, can I wait for the Focus electric or talk myself into the ACP conversion that AutoPort of Delaware is offering?

Mini E drivers charging without an EVSE

2010-12-24T22:11:00.001-05:00

Todd and Kari with Mini E #140 just posted a link to a You Tube video with Josh from AC Propulsion. If you look at 4 minutes and 50 seconds, you can clearly see that AC Propulsion has connected a 30 amp, 120 volt "Travel Trailer" plug directly to the charging cord for the Mini E. This allows them to charge at 3600 watts at a Recreational Vehicle park in the US. This is more than twice as fast as the usual 110 volt 12 amp yellow charging EVSE (Electric Vehicle Service Equipment) that Mini supplies in the US. But I find it a bit odd that they are showing this, because the electrical code requires that drawing current at 100% of a connector capacity (30 amps in this case) should be limited to 3 hours, which is not long enough to fully charge the Mini E. The code says to limit current to 80% of rated capacity when the load duration exceeds 3 hours. But then again, AC Propulsion can probably set the current draw to 24 amps in their car, which the rest of us cannot do. We have to live with 12, 32 and 50 amp settings. (All of which actually draw slightly less than what the setting shows.)

Then I see that MINI-E Driver Stefan Reitmeier from Germany posted a picture of his car plugged into a wall outlet without an EVSE. Maybe the regulations are more rational in Germany than in the US?

In any case, AC Propulsion has state of the art safety features built into the charging system in the car. But only an external EVSE can provide the "dead front" connector to the car. In other words, the connector face stays unpowered until it is actually engaged in the car receptacle. So although I admit I have charged without an EVSE myself, we should all avoid it whenever possible and stick to the US rules and Mini guidelines.

It is interesting though. Someday the US rules may change and charging will be more flexible.

Multiple power sources

2010-12-11T08:34:00.007-05:00

An isolation transformer from a surplus dealer in Brooklyn

It has been a week since I posted a blog about the need for multiple power inlets on early electric cars. I have not heard a single product announcement yet. What is taking so long? Clearly I am going to have to explain how to do it.

Let's skip over the most obvious case, where you are charging outside in the winter, you have access to two outlets on different circuits at 110 volts 15 amps, and you have a small cabin heater that you bought from J.C. Whitney or the like. Mount the heater safely, plug it in the second circuit, then your car is warm when you leave and you don't need to run the built in heater as much, extending your range. If you have air cooled batteries like the Mini E where the air comes from the cabin, then you have even warmed up your batteries and significantly increased your range. This is as trivial as it is important.

But now we turn to summer. You have found two outlets that you know are on different circuit breakers, and you want to charge faster than you can from one 110 volt outlet? First of all, Mini does not want you fooling around with their research car, so forget it. But if you have a Tesla, a DIY electric car you built yourself, or an electric car you own, maybe you have some options. The first and most obvious is the Quick 220 safety box. This device is simple, safe and reliable. It can detect two circuits that are on different phases and which therefore must be on separate circuits. It is available in 15 or 20 amp versions and provides a 220 volt outlet, either the type you find on a 220 volt air conditioner, or a twist lock. Tesla provides adapters for air conditioner receptacles, DIY types will have to make something. I don't know what the options are for Leaf or Volt owners yet. Maybe they will be like Mini and stick to the letter of the electrical code, maybe they will be advocates for changing the code to facilitate electric cars in a safe way. We'll see.

Quick 220 safety box, Model: A220-20D Version 2

The limitation of this approach is that it does not work with Ground Fault Interrupters. And just about every outdoor or garage outlet in the US has a GFI. If you find one that does not have a GFI, it should be upgraded. So what do you do now? Or let's say you have found two outlets on separate circuits, but they are on the same phase? The power is there, but cannot be stacked up to 220 volts. What to do?

The low tech solution for combining power from two GFI outlets into one receptacle involves an isolation transformer in addition to the Quick 220 box above. (It can also be used for two circuits on the same phase.) If one of the GFI supplies is isolated and the neutral side of the transformer output is tied to the neutral of other GFI, then the Quick 220 box can safely combine the two 110 volt sources into 220 volts. There are lots of things you have to get right: the transformer has to be big enough, the phasing has to be correct, the neutral wiring is tricky. It can be done, but don't try it at home as they say. Get a professional to help. And watch out for cheap Asian or Indian made transformers advertised on the Internet. Many are not transformers, they are Autoformers. The difference is that a transformer has electrical isolation between the primary and secondary windings. An Autoformer does not. An autoformer will not work here. Period.

Topaz 91002-11 transformer 2.5 kVA, Dual Standard Electric F246 Powerstat 7.2 kVA combined variable autoformers with T5587 Choke

Once you do get a transformer setup like this working, your car still may not want to charge. The Mini E is very fussy about the stability of the voltage source for charging, and this is a good thing. It prevents charging from undersized extension cords, corroded outlets, and other fire hazards. Nor would it like the voltage drop across a small transformer. I do not know, but I would assume all electric cars from reputable manufacturers have similar discriminating tastes in electricity supplies. So what to do?

There are several options if your car charger refuses to continue charging once it realizes the hokey setup you are trying to feed it with. I have a large Variac that I used to adjust my 108 volt supply at my work place up to 125 volts to charge a little faster. I expect that could be used, but it is expensive unless you have access to a surplus dealer like I did. It might be possible to load the transformer with a electric space heater and turn the heater down as the car ramps up its current draw. But this could cause you to trip a circuit breaker if you don't get the timing right.

All this is way too complicated for the average driver. The only reason I bring it up is that it can be done. And the people who should be doing it are the people bringing us the first generation of electric cars. Modern electronics can do the combining efficiently and safely. UL might have an aneurysm, and OPEC will probably bribe UL not to approve it. But it can be done. And someone should get working on it.

The one thing electric cars need most but no one is offering

2010-12-06T21:50:00.005-05:00

Every electric car, no matter the manufacturer (or start up), is offering one and only one power inlet.

Is this the only way it could be? Gas cars have only one filler pipe for the gas tank. So electric cars should have only one power receptacle, correct?

Wrong! At least in the USA. Much of the world has 220 volts as their standard supply voltage, which makes for a faster charging process. But in the USA we stayed with 110 volts even after light bulbs switched from carbon filaments to tungsten one hundred years ago. Since wires are more or less the same diameter in European homes as in US homes, this means there is less power available from US outlets, even if they are nominally safer.

There are many places in the US where it is easy to find multiple electrical outlets near each other that are on separate circuits. I always used two circuits in my garage in winter, one for charging the Mini E and one for keeping the cabin warm, which helps improve the battery performance greatly. (Of course the charging circuit was usually the 220 volt wall box and the heater was on 110 volts, but bear with me.)

At my work place in the winter, I used two separate, dedicated 110 volt circuits. One for charging, one for heating the car. I have done the same thing when stopping to charge at the homes of several other Mini E drivers. Plug the car into the charging box and run the cabin heater to a regular outdoor receptacle.

I have seen three separate 110 volt outlets at multiple shopping centers that have reserved parking spots for electric cars. Truck stops with the "Idle Aire" system provide three 20 amp outlets right next to each other, all on separate circuits. All sorts of camp grounds have multiple circuits side by side.

There is no reason not to provide a second connector, designed into electric cars, so that you can either run the cabin heating or cooling WHILE charging from a separate circuit, or simply double the charging rate if both circuits are 110 volts.

How to protect against someone plugging two cords into the SAME circuit? This is a very easy engineering task. If two circuits are out of phase with each other, they are guaranteed to be on different circuits. This was the case I had at work, this is the case with "Idle Aire", and the shopping center parking lots.

So, why not provide even more than two power inlets on an electric car? Actually the limit would be three. In industrial or commercial locations where power is generally supplied in three phases, three would be the maximum that could be definitively distinguished from each other, and thus verified to be on separate circuits. Idle Aire provides three outlets right next to each other, all on separate phases. Same in the shopping center parking lots. The two outlets I had access to at work were on different phases of a three phase supply, although I did not get around to finding a third circuit.

In the long run, two (or three) power inlets in an electric car might not be necessary, but in the short run it strikes me as essential for flexibility. And I don't hear any one talking about providing it. This is an engineering crime of omission. I cannot think of another thing that would improve the flexibility and even viability of early electric cars more than multiple power inlets.

And best of all, I don't see anything in the National Electrical Code or recommended practices of the Society of Automotive Engineers that forbids it.

So here is how it would work.

1) Plug in the first cord, the car starts charging.
2) Plug in cord number 2, and if the car can verify that the circuit is separate from the first, you either double your charging rate or use the added power to heat or cool the cabin, as you choose.
3) Plug in cord number 3, and if the car can verify that the circuit is separate from the first, you again increase your charging rate.

I understand that the coming BMW electric car will heat or cool the cabin from "shore power" but only after the battery is fully charged. With a single 110 volt supply, that is about all you can do. But with two circuits, it could be extremely useful at times to condition the cabin temperature BEFORE charging is complete. I speak from experience. 25,000 miles of electric car experience in the Mini E, to be precise. Much of it in cold weather.

There is a commercially available safety device that can combine two 110 volt outlets into a single 220 volt outlet. But for practical purposes, it would be of limited use for an electric car although I have heard of a Tesla driver using one effectively. These devices are popular for, say, contractors that need to operate a 220 volt floor sander in an older house, or operation of European instrumentation in a US facility. But for outdoor use with an electric car, the omnipresence of Ground Fault Interrupters (GFIs) makes this "Quick 220" box unusable for the average electric car driver. It only works without a GFI.

However, a properly engineered electronic interface in an electric car could easily take advantage of multiple separate 110 volt circuits to get faster charge times without special infrastructure installations in the early days of electric cars. And I don't hear anyone talking about it! Why? Has no one noticed? Are you guys asleep or something? Hello? Is anybody out there? Don't make me do it myself!

Why is it difficult to charge from a generator?

2010-12-04T22:17:00.037-05:00

A dual section "Variac", 7 kVA maximum. For use at 110 volt 12 amps, the minimum safe power capacity required is about 2 kVA.

I heard from other Mini E drivers that charging the car from a generator was usually unsuccessful. I never had occasion to try it, but it seems like a valuable backup plan if you could count on using a generator. So I wondered why it doesn't work. The story goes that large diesel generators sometimes work, but the Mini E always refuses to charge from a small gasoline generator.

I believe the reason is actually a safety feature built into the circuitry from AC Propulsion. The car measures the supply voltage before it starts charging, and then if the voltage drops too much as the car starts to draw power, it will stop charging. It figures you are using an extension cord that is too long, too thin, or has corroded connections or is somehow otherwise a fire hazard. This is why Mini explicitly says not to use an extension cord.

I noticed this safety mechanism once when I was trying to charge from a 110 volt outlet at a considerable distance. I had some very heavy cable (10 gauge, rated at 30 amps) but even though I was only drawing 12 amps, the car would refuse to charge through this very long extension. So after a long dry spell, I drove on the grass to get closer to the outlet and found that I could charge if I plugged in directly, or even if I used 100 feet of my heavy cord. But at 180 feet, it would refuse. If I recall correctly, the limit was about 8 volts of drop from no load to full load. More than 8 volts drop and the car refused to charge.

I had a large variable transformer for other reasons, so eventually I tried using it to correct for the voltage drop. It worked, and I was able to charge the car even using 180 feet of heavy cord. I would set the "Variac" (as it is called) so that the output voltage was equal to the input, which was about 110 volts. Then as the Mini E started drawing current, I would turn up the knob so that the output voltage stayed at 110 volts, more or less. And the car kept charging.

A Variac usually can adjust the output voltage over a range from +20% to -100% of the input

So my theory is that a small generator would have a significant voltage drop under load. A Variac could compensate for this drop. If someone who is still driving the Mini E has a small generator and would like to test this theory, leave a comment and I will get back to you. Maybe we can try it sometime.

It might not work, since a small generator would also change its frequency with load. I don't know if the Mini E cares about power line frequency, but it might. And frequency is harder to compensate for than voltage is. The large diesel generators that have been reported to sometimes work for charging the Mini E would likely have less variation in both frequency and voltage than a small generator.

If you are curious about the theory behind this voltage drop measurement, see the technical discussion on Wikipedia about Thévenin's theorem.

J1772 standard plug appears for sale on the internet

2010-11-15T19:30:00.002-05:00

Those of us who could not renew our lease on the Mini E had the option of keeping the wall mounted EVSE, which is the safety and convenience interface box for charging. But since it has a connector that is specific to the Mini E, it is of limited use.

Clipper Creek, the manufacturer of the EVSE (electric vehicle service equipment) supplied with the Mini E has not yet been able to supply an upgrade cord and connector to convert to the new standard connector, called the SAE J1772 connector. This will be used by the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and other upcoming electric cars for sale in the US market.

Before giving the links to the connectors for sale on the Internet, allow me to speculate as to why UL is giving Clipper Creek a hard time about upgrading existing 240 volt EVSE boxes to J1772.

One of the UL requirements met by the Clipper Creek wall box appears to be that it is explosion proof, like all electrical equipment that might be installed at a gasoline filling station is required to be. This means that the enclosure is sealed and air tight. If the cable were changed and the new cable were not exactly the same diameter, it might not meet these requirements.

Even in your garage, this might be important. Building and electrical codes usually require that all possible sources of ignition in a garage such as electrical outlets (which can cause sparks), switches, water heaters with an open flame, etc., must all be installed at least 18 inches above the floor, where gasoline fumes collect. Your car does not emit gas fumes, you say? Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Stuff breaks. It is better if your house does not explode just because a hose clamp splits in your car.

The kind of spark that can be created from a 240 volt 50 amp breaker in an EVSE it much more intense than what you get from a light switch. Better to keep it sealed in an air tight box, don't you think? Not to mention that UL requires these EVSE to be safe around cars powered by lead acid batteries that can emit lots of hydrogen gas. (If you have one of those, code requires that the EVSE starts a ventilation fan before charging in an enclosed space. The Clipper Creek EVSE can provide for that too.)

So anyone who is considering converting the connector on your Clipper Creek box, please keep the safety points above in mind. If you think it cannot happen to you, try typing "house explosion" into Google news.

And of course, the current rating on the new cable must equal or exceed the rating of your EVSE. Don't go putting a 32 amp cable on a 50 amp Clipper Creek box.

Now, here is what I found for sale today:

70 amp connector and socket, 40 foot cable, $475 from Current EV Tech
The picture at the top of this post came from the above link. The blog where I originally found this catalog said that Current EV Tech once offered a UL certified J1772 plug from ITT Cannon for over $800. I don't know if this link is also from ITT cannon, which is a very reputable name in connectors.

32 amp plug only, $450
Not much info on this page, it lists a part number that appears to be of Chinese origin. It might be the same as the one above for all I can tell, but no mention is made of a cable that I can find today.

Like all things electronic, I expect the prices to drop and UL certification to be more common. Just watch out for the seal going into the EVSE box, try to keep it air tight.

Charging safety

2010-11-13T12:52:00.003-05:00

I recently posted some photos of the last long trip we took in the Mini E before we had to return the electric car. This 1000 mile round trip involved charging the car at RV campgrounds. This is technically not allowed by the National Electrical Code, which allows an RV to connect to a 50 amp 240 outlet but does not allow electric cars to charge from them. I generally agree with this regulation, as I am an electrical engineer who is quite concerned with safety. The old connector design is not particularly safe for frequent use, especially outdoors. RVs are "grandfathered" in, but newer safer connection technology should be required for electric car charging.

Shortly after I posted these photos, Mini emailed a reminder all the lessees that this sort of connection is actually forbidden by the terms of the lease. They said in part "...It is crucial to the safe operation of the vehicle that any equipment not supplied by MINI, never be used to charge or operate your MINI E. This includes any electrical connection adapter for the vehicle, OUC, or wallbox, and also prohibits the use of the OUC or the wallbox in any location not specifically intended for its designed or installed use."

I would not recommend that anyone else do what I did. And I should mention that with one exception, either myself or my wife (who is also an engineer) was constantly monitoring the charging connection and process on this trip. Part of the motivation for trying this was to see if cross country travel could be at all practical in a production electric car. The idea was not to repeatedly take long trips with a research vehicle like the Mini E. My conclusion is that cross country travel is just barely practical if the electric car has AT LEAST a 50 amp BUILT IN charging ability. Note that NONE of the several electric cars soon to come to market offers this. The only exception is the Tesla, which offers up to 80 amps as I understand it. But 80 amps can only be supplied from dedicated EV connections, since the largest commonly available general purpose outlet in the US is 50 amps.

I understand that Tesla has figured out a way to allow their customers to safely charge from the connections available at RV campgrounds, the so called NEMA 14-50 outlets which are also commonly used for electric stoves in the US. But Telsa sells their cars, so they can afford to develop a small travel version of the safety and convenience interface, the so called EVSE box (Electric Vehicle Service Equipment) like our larger Clipper Creek box. BMW is only leasing the Mini E as part of a research project, and we should all respect the constraints this places on what is offered.

But an even larger motivation of posting what we did on our long trip was aimed at the Mini E drivers out there that are doing even riskier things. I wanted to show that you CAN use the Clipper Creek safety interface. NO ONE should be charging their car without taking advantage of the numerous safety features offered by the Electric Vehicle Service Equipment box, even if you are traveling. Yes, it is big but there is that roof rack available from Mini that I showed in all the photos, without saying one word about it until now. Hint hint!

From the way the news is coming in, this will all be moot soon enough when fast chargers are available in more places. But that will take time. Meanwhile, there will always be people pushing the envelope. The real point of my posting was this: If you are going to break the rules, DON'T CHARGE WITHOUT THE EVSE! ALWAYS USE A SAFETY BOX! Really, Mini is right, please don't break any of the rules. But for those out there who are going to break some anyway, be aware of what is a "mortal sin" and what is a "venial sin", so to say.

And especially, do not ever run 30 amps through the small yellow "occasional use cord". I know there are some who have tried this, but there is a large risk of fire. 12 amps max for the little yellow EVSE!

Four light bulbs = 15,000 miles in the Mini E

2010-10-02T19:42:00.005-04:00

There has been an interesting analogy mentioned on a few blogs lately, and I have confirmed the calculation.

The claim is that driving 15,000 miles per year in a Mini E or a similar electric car uses about as much electricity as four 100 watt light bulbs burning all year. You can read Tom's explanation here, near the end of the fifth paragraph. So much for those who say large numbers of electric cars cannot be supported by the present electric grid. Nonsense!

To go further, I am curious how many of those 4 light bulbs I can offset by efficiency measures. So I just counted up all the light bulbs in my house, found out how much electricity this house used last year and got average percentages of residential electricity usage consumed by lighting from a Wikipedia article.

Here is how it works out: I have over one hundred light bulbs in my home, but according to the statistics they are probably only on for an average of 2.3% of the time. My math says this is equivalent to two light bulbs being on all year, one of them at 60 watts and the other at 75 watts. That's roughly 1.2 megawatt hours per year for lighting, or 12% of the total 10 mWh this house used last year.

Even so, since about 93 of my lights are now high efficiency fluorescent bulbs, I am saving about the equivalent of one of those 100 watt incandescent bulbs burning all year. One down, three to go to offset the electricity used by an electric car.

We have only been in our new house for several months, but our electricity usage is trending 10% below last year, even though this summer was much hotter. This is because we keep the thermostat at 78 degrees F in summer and open windows at night if is cool outside. So I figure that saves the equivalent of about another two light bulbs burning all year at 100 watts each. Now I am three down, one to go.

Many other electric car drivers have mentioned that they have installed solar power on their homes, which easily offsets more than all the energy used by their electric car. We have looked into solar power, but here in North Carolina we see a better return from installing a ground source heat pump to replace the upstairs zone of our air conditioning and furnace. So we are doing that now.
I have not run the numbers yet, but I feel confident that we have already offset more than enough electricity to power an electric car. We don't have the Mini E anymore, since they would not let us bring it to North Carolina. But we will probably get another electric car in the near future.

Plus, we will probably add solar power in the coming years. We are holding off for several reasons: While the federal and state tax incentives in North Carolina cover two thirds of solar power installation cost, the market for the production credits has dried up here. I understand that in New Jersey, the Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs) can be worth about 60 cents per kilowatt hour generated. But at the moment there is almost no market for SRECs in NC. Plus, electricity in NC costs about half of what it costs in NJ. So payback times for solar power are longer in NC. In addition we are in an urban setting and have a lot of trees, not to mention a hip roof, all of which is less than ideal for solar power. Still, we believe we can design a good system to generate 3 kilowatts of solar power in the coming years. Maybe more over time if micro inverters that support battery backup systems become available. And of course prices of solar panels should continue to drop.

So in summary the argument that electric cars just move pollution from the tail pipe to the smoke stack is ridiculous. It is easy to offset the electricity used by an electric car.

Pictures from our 1000 mile trip

2010-09-25T20:47:00.009-04:00

It has been a couple months since we moved out of the support area around New York city, and had to give back the electric Mini E. But before we left, we took a drive to North Carolina from New Jersey in the electric. That post is here. Now that we are settled in after the move, here are some pictures for the big trip in the Mini E:

This was our first charging stop at Ken's house, charging at 50 amps with Ken's Mini E in the background. (Ken has since returned his Mini E as well, but he still has home made electric Metro I bet.)

The next stop is one of our favorites, Bar Harbor Marina and RV park in Abingdon, Maryland. They are friendly, the fee was $10 (shows as a dump station visit on the receipt), the place is pleasant and shady, and best of all their electric service is well maintained. We had charged at 50 amps at this particular parking spot last winter for three hours with no trouble. This time it was summer and perhaps because it was warmer, the breaker did trip after an hour of charging. No problem, we pulled into an adjacent spot where we completed charging without further interruption. And, the maintenance guy came over to work on the outlet and breaker box as soon as he heard we had trouble. His question about the Mini E was unique, he wanted to know if it could be towed behind an RV and charge the Mini E battery by Regenerative braking while it was being towed. (I wonder what Mini would say to that...)

Our next stop was just as friendly, same $10 fee, at much larger RV park near Washington DC. But we had much more trouble with keeping the breakers on at 50 amps. Ken told me he had charged here also, but perhaps it was in cooler weather. In any case, after plugging in and starting to charge at 50 amps, we heard a sound you might describe as "Snap, crackle and pop" coming from the breaker box for 10 seconds or so. Something was heating up and perhaps boiling off moisture. We noticed this at many campgrounds. It was early in the season, perhaps there was a lot of condensation in the boxes from winter. But the car did not charge for more than twenty minutes before the breaker tripped, and the breaker felt quite warm. This is caused either by wires that are not tight, corrosion on contacts, very old breakers that have tripped many times, or under sized wire. In the picture above, you can see that we tried an adjacent outlet without moving the car, an unexpected benefit of the very long six gauge cable that I added to the Clipper Creek box. In the end we moved to an adjacent camp site that was more in the shade, where we found an outlet that did not trip. This was a frustrating stop, but I did not complain. We did not know at this point that we would have this problem at many more campgrounds.

There were many good stops, some where they asked us what we thought we should pay, and we never had a single breaker trip. We even stopped at one place where they did not want to take more than $2 to charge the car. The stop in Amelia's Court House, Virginia, was just plain delightful. At other stops they insisted on full price like an overnight RV stay (usually around $35) even though we expected to leave in 3 hours, but there was no breaker that would stay on for more than 15 minutes. So much for high price meaning high quality.

One very friendly KOA where we stayed overnight was an interesting situation. They had mostly the older hookups, which are only 120 volts. Usually there are two of the common household outlets (NEMA 5-20) and one Travel Trailer connection, a 30 amp 120 volt outlet. We had called ahead and asked if we could use one of their few 50 amp 240 volt sites for a couple hours and then rent a cabin to stay over night. With the charging problems at our previous stops that day, we arrived later than expected and the 50 amp sites were all taken. (I could have put down a deposit but I would have had to pay the full over night rate for an RV.) We rented a cabin and I did what I had hoped not to do, I plugged into the TT-30 outlet and charged the car at 30 amps, 120 volts overnight. That is fast enough to reach 100% by morning, but the Clipper Creek equipment (shown above) is not set up for 120 volts at 30 amp, so I had to use a direct connection. I have since figured out how to adapt the large Clipper Creek box to 120 volt input, by using an international 240 to 120 volt travel transformer to keep the brains happy but wiring the relay for 120 volt operation. Too late now, I don't have the car to test it anymore! But that night I charged without the safety equipment, shame on me. I have heard of someone charging through the small yellow Clipper Creek box (shown below) at 30 amps, which is literally risking a fire especially in warmer weather.

Instead, I wired the heavy orange cable from the large Clipper Creek box directly to a TT-30 plug and connected to the Mini E without the safety box that keeps the car plug de-energized when it is disconnected. Fortunately no children were up and about by the time we plugged in. It turned out fine, but I won't do that again.

By the way, a county park just west of Washington DC had the newest electrical connections we saw. In the photo above, the NEMA 14-50 is on the left and the TT-30 is on the right. We had very good luck charging here. The fee was more than the usual $10 but less an over night RV stay. At this point we were happy to pay, since we were on the return trip and our previous stop had such bad wiring that we gave up with less than 50% charge after paying $35 for a so called 50 amp outlet that would not even deliver 30 amps without tripping the breaker.

While talking to many campground owners, several of them clearly were thinking this might be the Next Big Thing, and talked about adding charging spots specifically for electric cars. Others, as I have noted above, were completely clueless. I hope someone creates an internet site for rating campgrounds in terms of being friendly to electric cars, having good power that can sustain 50 amps without interruptions, etc.

We miss the Mini E, and none of the soon-to-be-available electric car options get close to that built-in 50 amp charging ability which makes cross country travel possible, if leisurely. It is fun to see that Li-ion Motors, near us here in North Carolina, won part of the X prize. They offer a converted Mini on their web site. I have no idea what the charge time is, they have not answered my email yet. But my daily commute is down from 120 + miles to about 20, so I can bicycle a couple times a week. Maybe I will survive without an electric car for now. Sniff.

This is a little off topic, but in Southern New Jersey the power company PSE & G has been putting up solar power panels on telephone poles. There are hundreds of them it seems. Above you can see one of them right in front of Ken's house, where we charged up many times. These panels use a micro inverter. We have looked into adding solar panels on our house, but we have lots of trees around and traditional solar panels do not like any shade on any panel in an array. A small amount of shade can cause a huge drop in power output because of the way the cells are wired in series. Now that micro inverters are competitive, the partial shade problem is significantly reduced. The only remaining problem is that micro inverters are not yet compatible with battery backup systems. And I for one do not like the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a solar power array that stops producing if the grid goes down. Which is what they do without battery backup. It is a safety requirement, technically called Island Protection mode.

Higher efficiency means more variation in range

2010-07-06T21:14:00.003-04:00

It became very clear over the course of over 27 thousand miles in the Mini E that the range is very elastic. If I knew I had to go farther than usual, I was confident I could always do it just by driving slower and more gently than usual. As long as the whole trip was less than 150 miles.

The big point here is that the more efficient a drive train is, the more variation in range there will be between driving aggressively and driving gently.

Here is an easy way to think about it without much math:

Let's say you have a very inefficient drive train that wastes 90% of your fuel no matter how you drive. The greatest effect you could have on your range by driving either very aggressively or very gently might be about 10%.

Now let's say you have a very efficient drive train that only wastes 10% of your fuel, worst case. Then you might expect that you could change your range by 90% depending on how you drive.

The average gas car is not as bad as the first example, but not far off.

The Mini E is not quite as good as the second example, but not far off.

Which is why an electric car can have a large variation in range depending on how smart or dumb the driver is about driving on any given day.

And this is also another reason why smart people with a little experience never ever have range anxiety in an electric car. We always start off in the morning with 100% charge, we know what our cars can do and how to get them to do it. And we plan accordingly.

And if we know we have the range, the Mini E has the performance to make dumb driving (that is, fast driving) a really fun time. But only when we know we can afford it. And then there are drivers who just cannot slow down, no matter what. Well, they are another story.

Maybe I'll cook up a first order mathematical treatment of this assertion about range variation if I can get one or two of my engineering buddies to check my work, and I'll post it in the near future.

By the way, show me a car that always has a full tank in the morning, where the driver never has to go out of the way to get fuel, and the driver never has to waste any time while the car is fueling, and I will show you an electric car.

Why is it that carcinogenic car drivers don't get this?

Even though the Mini E was returned a month ago, I plan a few more posts. One will be the experiences of a friend who drove my Mini E for the last few weeks after I moved out of New Jersey. (He liked it, even though he mostly charged it at 12 amps.) Another will be about the amazing "Variac" and why it became my best friend while charging the car at work. Perhaps the last post will be about the problems some people have reported when trying to charge from a generator and how to work around these problems.

500 miles from home

2010-05-02T15:33:00.005-04:00

Our first really long trip taken by charging the electric car at "RV parks" was not always fun. But it can be done. We drove from New Jersey to North Carolina. We did not quite make it in two days as planned, but almost.

The short story is that many campgrounds or Recreational Vehicle (RV) Parks that have 50 amp receptacles do not maintain them well. The screws on the connectors, circuit breakers, and buss bars should be tightened periodically. Breakers that have tripped many times tend to get weak, and trip at lower than rated current. These circuit breakers should be replaced.

Without this maintenance, the circuits can run hot and will not sustain the 100% current rating for 3 hours, which the specifications require. (For more than 3 hours, load must be reduced to 80% of rating. Fortunately, the Mini E draws 48 amps for about 2.5 hours and then current draw decreases for the last 30 minutes of charging.)

We had varying trouble with circuit breakers tripping at almost half of the campgrounds we visited. At one campground, we tried over 6 camp sites before finding a power outlet that would charge the car for more than 10 minutes or so. On the return trip, we gave up completely at one campground and left with only 50% charge because no circuits would stay on for long.

For this and other reasons, our travels took a bit longer than planned. Of course the best course of action when a 50 amp circuit will not support 50 amps is to reduce charging current to 32 amps, and get where you are going later than planned.

Disclaimer: The US National Electrical Code does not approve of operating Electric Vehicle Service Equipment rated over 1500 watts (which is the size of the Mini E slow charger) unless it is permanently connected to a circuit that is rated at 20% higher amperage than what the car draws. The fact that RVs are allowed to connected through a NEMA 14-50 connector at 240 volts 50 amps, while an electric car is not allowed to do so, might be thought of as a Grandfather clause. The NEMA 14-50 connector is old and not particularly safe for the general public to use on a daily basis. It is not so problematic when hidden behind your kitchen stove for 10 years at a time.

Anyone employing such unapproved uses should be well trained and carefully monitor the connections while charging a car. Really, it should not be done at all. Hopefully we will have purpose designed charging infrastructure more widely installed soon.

I have heard that Tesla supports charging through a NEMA 14-50 plug. If that is true, I am curious how they do that with the electrical code as it stands today. And Tesla has quite a few more options for setting the charging current. It would be nice to be able to reduce current to 40 amps in the Mini E for instance.

The bottom line on our trip is that traveling long distances by electric car is possible now. It takes a lot of planning, and the first trip might be troublesome but once you learn which campgrounds to avoid, it can be very pleasant albeit slower than piston powered travel. We enjoyed driving a couple hours and then stopping for a couple hours to hike, eat, nap, or whatever before heading out again. That is, when we were at well maintained camp grounds.

Oh, and bring bottled water. Don't trust the well water at campgrounds.

Yeah, and as other bloggers have mentioned, the only 240 volt receptacles at campgrounds in the US are those that are nominally rated 50 amps. The 30 amp receptacles are 120 volt "NEMA TT-30" and cannot be used with the Clipper Creek safety box. 20 amp receptacles are always the standard home style (NEMA 5-20) plugs. We did use 20 amp outlets at motels with the slow charger. More and more motels seem to know where their outdoor outlets are and are OK with them being used.

Three quarters through

2010-02-23T17:12:00.006-05:00

After eight months and almost 20,000 miles, I am three quarters of the way through the one year lease of the electric Mini. And I am happier than I expected. The driving experience makes even "luxury" cars seem primitive by comparison, not to mention stinky. There have been issues with the Mini E but most are in the past and issues are to be expected with a prototype. Due to the issues I have experienced, Mini has waived several of the lease payments so I cannot complain at all about the expense.

I continue to easily get 120 mile range with just a little caution even in the cold weather. Although, to get this range in the cold I should not have to use an auxiliary space heater to warm up the battery while it is parked and charging. But the car is a prototype and this is a small concession that will not be needed in production models. And being from Minnesota, plugging in a heater in the car is only natural when the weather is such I am putting on wool underwear anyway.

They are still working on the built in cabin heater. I use it on short trips when I don't need 100+ mile range. The built in heater was very strong at first but quickly went weak. They replaced a control module and some wiring a month ago and it was wicked hot for 6 days. Not very long. Then it got really hot only half of the time, so it went back in for service. They sent it to northern New Jersey for a complete tear down of the heater. This time they replaced the heater core and some more wiring. They claimed it measured between 130 and 150 degrees F at the vents when they were done, but when I picked it up it was lukewarm again. I have tried it a few times since and every time it has been quite hot, but they understand there is work to be done to get the heater right. I think they said they now have my old heater core in one of the engineering mules and are evaluating what is wrong.

But the big problem for a small number of us with high voltage from the power company is fixed. Charging problems are a thing of the past.

Compared to the other options out there, I don't see anything close to the Mini E. The Leaf has a shorter range and does not have complete thermal management for the battery, so I might as well stay with the Mini E which I know how to manage manually. The Volt has absurdly short electric range, especially after I have been spoiled by the Mini E. Plus the Volt still carries around a big can of cancer causing poison called gasoline. That's is what I'm trying to get away from! And the upcoming BMW electric does not present the air of humility that I look for in a car, if you can forgive me for getting subjective. So if they offer to let me extend the lease on the Mini E, I will try to hang on to it for as long as possible.

No more charging problems, heater still an issue

2010-02-11T20:16:00.005-05:00

The electricians came by today and installed a buck transformer which lowers my charging voltage to 240 volts from the unusually high 252 volts that I normally have. This should be end of my charging problems.

The transformer (really an autoformer in this configuration) is branded Acme. If you can believe it. It hums quietly. My wife hates things that hum. But I can turn off the breaker when I'm not charging the car.

Acme? Not Sola? Not Square D? I wonder if Grainger carries Acme? Or Graybar? Well. Interesting. Anyway. I'm trying not to look at the country of origin sticker.

I had the car in for 18,000 mile service last week. They fixed the heater. It was wicked hot for about 6 days. Now it has gone lukewarm again. I guess those folks at Behr have a ways to go up the learning curve on high voltage electric heaters.

They also put in my fourth PEU. This one does not hum. The old one hummed loudly.

All in all I am happy. Big snow here in Jersey. Lots of fun. And the E is moving again. Yea!

UPDATE: OK, my electrician assures me that Acme is well known and respected brand in transformers, and it is labeled as made in NAFTA, if you catch my meaning if you get my drift. But I couldn't resist the chance to invoke Wile E. Coyote again. He became my alter ego for a while there.

All the cabin heat you could want and no range decrease

2010-02-03T20:38:00.005-05:00

There is a report that a new Electric Vehicle planned by Volvo incorporates a liquid fuel cabin heater:

Volvo EV uses E85 for Cabin Heat

What I find interesting here is the comments after the article which make it clear this is far from a new idea. I was aware of the old air cooled VW Beetles in the 1960s that had accessory cabin heaters which burned gasoline. (I heard descriptions of these heaters failing which gave new meaning to the phrase Flame Out. As in flames coming out of the dash vents.) But several 1990 vintage EVs also used some variety of liquid fuel cabin heaters as do many (most?) contemporary EVs in Norway, where there are a lot of EVs. Hmm, does that oil producing country know something we don't?

I'll stick with the long underwear and wool socks, thank you very much. But great idea. Even the Corvair used a liquid fuel cabin heater. (I didn't know the Corvair had an air cooled engine.)

Does anyone know if E85 burning at atmospheric pressure in a simple furnace type of heat exchanger burns more cleanly than under the crazy cycles of a piston engine? I assume so. Now where does the heater exhaust go in an automotive package? I presume a tail pipe, not a chimney or (God forbid) the cabin?

Still, liquid fuels are efficient at providing heat and electricity is efficient and smooth at providing motive force. Use the best tool for the job.

The elctricians are coming!

2010-02-03T19:09:00.004-05:00

Got the call from Franklin Electric today, the buck transformers arrived. They will be by next week to knock my line voltage down to 240 volts from the 252 volts that PSE&G supplies. This will be the end of my cold weather charging problems.

I have heard that voltage tolerance is actually a regulatory function, meaning a political decision in the local area. A friend up in upstate NY who works for the power company says they can deliver plus or minus 10% of nominal, which surprises me. (Nominal being 120 or 240.) If I recall correctly, the good folks at quick220.com were telling me that the Arizona utility they talked to aims at plus or minus 5% for class A service, meaning not at peak load in the summer. Class B service is plus 5% minus 10% tolerance. This makes sense. I have seen minus 10% at work in the summer, which works out to 108 volts.

Another PEU bites the dust

2010-01-31T21:38:00.006-05:00

I was getting close to 18,000 miles. My third Power Electronics Unit has hummed while charging since they installed it. At my last regular service I mentioned the humming but they did not change the PEU.

When Mini engineering visited my home to diagnose the cold weather problem with fast charging, they agreed the humming was not good and directed the dealer to replace my PEU as soon as I could bring it in.

Well, a busy month at work meant I put off going in for service until the regular interval. Friday night when I got home with an ambient temperature of 18 degrees F, I had more than the usual trouble getting the car to start charging at 50 amps because of the cold. After about a dozen attempts to get it to start charging, the humming got extremely loud, the lights in the house dimmed (my wife noticed that upstairs) and the car cut off charging after 5 seconds as usual. I stopped trying to get the car to charge.

I dropped it off at the dealer on the weekend with red tape over the charging port and warned them not to try to charge it until the PEU is repaired. The contacts on the plug and the charging port are dark now, as if it got hot.

Maybe too much attention was paid to over voltage cutoff for safety, since an overly aggressive threshold is what has caused a cold weather problem with the fast charger for a few of us. And the AC Propulsion box has its own over voltage safety cutoff also. Maybe a fast electronic cutoff for over current conditions would be in order. The circuit breaker in the electric panel is enough for human safety but may be too slow to protect the connectors on the car. Over current cutoff might be a good feature for Clipper Creek to add to the wall box.

Hey, I'm glad it happened to me. A civilian might have been upset. I do similar stuff at my job so this does not bother me at all. I actually find it to be gratifying when I find a new problem of this magnitude. I bet Mini and AC Propulsion both learn a lot from this. And I bet nobody else ever has this happen to them. Seems like a one in a million failure mode. Good thing to find and fix before they make a million electric cars.

Some car heaters are dangerous, but this one looks safe

2010-01-18T19:37:00.005-05:00

I bought a space heater for the car and posted a link awhile back. The thing was made in China and it is dangerous. The fan stopped, the coils started glowing red and smoke came from the plastic cover. It does not appear to have an overheat shutoff like every hair dryer.

The older heater I got from Napa years ago seems very safe but appears to be discontinued. I hear it cycling off and on as the car gets very warm, so I know the safety sensor is working. I suspect it was from ZeroStart, which is a Canadian arm of Phillips Tempro. They still offer a better model with a metal case:

900 watt 120 volt car heater from JC Whitney

Looks to be around $110 but if it does not set my car on fire, it might be worth it since keeping the batteries warm is giving me Great Range! Every one else is complaining but I am getting the best range I ever have even in this cold.

The northern Europeans seem to have more choices for car interior preheaters. They cannot afford to warm their cars up by idling since the fuel prices are higher there. But the DEFA brand of heaters does not seem to be available in the US.

Let me count the ways...

2010-01-16T21:38:00.003-05:00

In our neighborhood in the winter, many people idle their cars in the morning to warm them up before leaving. And since most cars run a rich fuel mixture when cold, the neighborhood smells like an oil refinery in Louisiana in the summer. It Stinks.

This is not the only reason I love the Mini E, which does not contribute to this problem.

We heard today from someone who has an autistic child in the family that living within 3 miles of a major highway is a significant risk factor for having an autistic child.

This is not the only reason I love the Mini E, which does not contribute to this problem.

There was a report recently about the health problems caused by dust from automobile brake linings, which are still severe even though asbestos is no longer used. I for one usually walk 3 miles a day but I cannot walk near busy roads or my eyes get irritated.

This is not the only reason I love the Mini E, which hardly contributes to this problem because of regenerative brakes which create no dust.

And don't even get me started about OPEC, geopolitical stability, global warming, and on and on and on.

These are not the only reasons I love the Mini E, which does not contribute to these problems.

Back when I did my long commute to work in a gasoline car, I was often exhausted by it. Now with the vibration free and noise free and fume free Mini E, I am rarely fatigued by the drive.

Should I go on? I think the point is clear.

There has been a lot of discussion on this blog about the issues with the Mini E. They are minor minor minor compared to the advantages.

What really bugs the Boss

2010-01-16T21:20:00.003-05:00

Now that the charging problem is (soon to be) behind us, I got my wife to drive the Mini E again. She had been a big fan and always wanted to drive it. If it is the gas car, she never wants to drive. But awhile ago she soured on the Mini E and I assumed it was the charging problem, which is now over.

But that was only a small part of it.

So she drove the the store the other evening while I was the passenger. Short trip, lots of charge, cold night, so what do I do that I never do on my long commute to work?

Turn on the heater!

And what does the heater do that is very reminiscent of a Microsoft product or device?

It crashes! It was very warm for several minutes and then ice cold. And nothing I did with the knobs made any difference once it went cold.

And my wife's tone made it very clear that this is why she has soured on the car. I recall once several weeks ago she eagerly took the Mini E to choir practice, about 25 miles away. The heater crashed on her, and she froze. Never since has she wanted to take the Mini E.

I suspect the PTC design (positive temperature coefficient) is simply unstable and if the fan is too low for the heat setting, it cuts off. But I will have to take some data. I think Robert pointed this out first, and I recall Tom agreeing the heater was not dependable.

I don't know if this problem is in just a few cars or all of them. Or something wacky like the charging problem that arguably had to do with outside variables. (Any Mini E would have had that charging problem at my house probably.) I suppose I have to head over to the Facebook discussion group and see who else has observed this issue.

I do know that if there is any hope of extending the lease on my Mini E, it will only be possible if Mini can make that heater dependable. Because my boss likes to be toasty warm and does not like to have to think about a fussy heater when she is driving. And that is the way it should be.

Diagnosis - high voltage

2010-01-16T20:49:00.003-05:00

So the team from BMW came by last week to verify their plan of adding a buck transformer to lower my line voltage. Yes, of course it worked to fix the problem with the fast charger not starting. The electrician will be coming back in a week or so to install the smallish transformer permanently.

I assume the six of us with this problem all had positive results from this test. This is really a work-around and not a root cause solution, but it is good enough for a prototype program. The bigger question in my mind is whether the analysis they have done explains what Mike and myself and others have observed:

1) Waiting will allow the car to start charging even if the line voltage is still higher than nominal.

2) The problem is worse in the cold regardless of line voltage.

3) When the voltage is really high and the temperature really low, there are three stages of symptoms: No response at all, then after waiting awhile the car will blink once and wall box will shut off with the red light, then wait longer and the car will blink several times before stopping while the wall box stays on. Eventually if you wait long enough the car will charge normally.

Of course this might only be if the garage is warm enough and the only real variables are voltage and temperature.

But hey, the problem solution is complete. All I care about is soon I won't have to turn on the 8000 watt sauna heater in the basement to pull down the line voltage far enough to get my car to start charging.

But the good folks at BMW might want to dig a little deeper. Cold weather performance is what separates the Men from the Boys, as they say.

Happiness is a warm battery

2010-01-11T20:17:00.003-05:00

Everything is fine now, the batteries thawed out nicely and stayed warm enough with the portable heater on the floor to charge all night. I left for home with 85% charge today.

And now I have an analysis target for that annoying monster of data that I have in my trip logs.

I am going to troll through that data and see if the temperature of the batteries on departure is related to the range. Most people are complaining about a big drop in range in the cold, but not me. And as far as I can tell no one but me is preheating the car from shore power and thereby keeping the batteries really warm.

Of course, I just had the one glaring exception of last Saturday when the batteries got so cold that they stopped charging from the slow charger. (I suspect the fast charger would cause enough self heating of the batteries that they would not have stopped charging at 10 degrees F ambient temperature.)

I expect that the data will show the range hardly affected by the cold weather as long as the batteries are warm.

Dogged the cold "bullet"

2010-01-10T21:21:00.006-05:00

Drove to work last Saturday, the first time I have driven very aggressively in the Mini E. On arrival I had 15% charge left, batteries up at 90 degrees F, and the forecast saying ten degrees expected that night.

Plugged in the car on the slow charger, but with only a few hours at work and much lower charge than usual, it was clear I was leaving the Mini E over night and driving my gas car home for the 65+ mile drive.

I left my 900 watt 120 volt accessory cabin heater on the timer to run 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off all night. But I did not have a good feeling with the low temperature forecast. So I went back on Sunday and sure enough, it had stopped charging at 40% and did not want to start charging again.

Driving around the parking lot, I had the symbol with the thermometer in a gear on the dash. The book says that means the battery is too hot (there was no regenerative braking) but I think it also comes on when the battery is too cold. The dash display said 56 degrees F but someone says that is the warmest battery pack, I suspect some packs were too cold to charge.

When trying to restart the charging, the car would blink several times and then the safety box would cut off with a slow blinking red light. I think it was labeled "charging fault" but I did not pay much attention.

I turned on the built in heater AND plugged in the 120 volt accessory heater full time, and for a while I aimed the accessory heater straight down the vents to the battery packs, switching back and forth between the two vents.

After this heating, the charging would start and kept going for over an hour. The battery temperature on the dash display came up to 59 degrees. So I went home, leaving the accessory heater running full time all night in the Mini E. I'll see if the car is still charging in the morning.

I knew when Mini said you have to have a garage for this car, they meant it. A prototype with an air cooled battery is not up for New York Metro area winters outside. I was afraid I was headed down the path that some others have reported with a hard failure and weeks with no word from service. Maybe I still am, tomorrow will tell. But next time I leave it outside on a cold winter night, the accessory heater is staying on full time. Part time is good enough for in the garage only.

But I am completely confident that the production electric cars with liquid based temperature regulation for the battery will not have this problem even parked outside.

Heated seats and blankets

2010-01-05T15:56:00.006-05:00

When we visited Ken last week to charge at his place on our trip, he mentioned that a heated seat would be nice in the Mini E and probably use less power, thereby not reducing the driving range as much as the cabin heater.

Now, I like to brag that I don't use the heat on my 120 mile commute but I admit it is getting a little old. And it turns out there are many 12 volt electric blankets and heated seat cushions on the Internet for sale. The hard part is finding one that specifies the amount of power it draws. The Mini E has only one 12 volt outlet that I can find, which is limited to 200 watts.

Here are some that do specify power drain:

60 watt heated blanket

45 watt heated seat cushion

80 watt 12 volt blanket

I think I am going shopping. I might have to retire my hot water bottle if one of these work. But then I won't be able to call myself a Manly Man anymore, using a sissy heater...

Does wearing wool underwear qualify one as a Manly Man?

Buck Boost transformers

2010-01-05T15:16:00.005-05:00

A few posts ago, I speculated about a way to lower the AC power line voltage for those half dozen of us that are having trouble with the fast charging in cold weather. It is clear that the problem is related to a supply voltage that is slightly above nominal. The car should accept this voltage and indeed it does but only in warm weather. So OK, great, we found a small problem that AC Propulsion and Mini can fix before the production car comes out. But the problem remains for six of us in the frozen north.

The cost of a transformer that can sustain 12,000 watts for my 50 amp charger is prohibitive, as is the size. It occurred to me that all that is needed is a small transformer with a 12 volt 60 amp output, wired to oppose the 240 volts from the power company feed. This is only a 720 watt transformer, much cheaper and smaller than 12,000 watts.

Well, none of my engineering colleagues had heard of this but everyone thought it should work, at least theoretically. (None of us specialize in power transmission, so what do we know? Nada.) When drawing up my idea shown above, I looked around the net and behold, there is an entire class of such devices called Buck Boost transformers. Technically they should be called "autoformers" since the primary and secondary windings are connected.

Whatever.

I got the call today, Mini is coming by next week to either fix my charging problem or at least test a fix. I suspect they already figured out the Buck Boost Autoformer option. We'll see.

And yes, the National Electrical Code has a whole section on how to wire the things. So it is all kosher. Well, maybe not the switch I show in my fantasy schematic. That would let you easily go back to the higher voltage in summer and charge a few minutes faster. But I have not read the code in detail to see if it is allowed. I bet not. But theoretically it should work without burning down the house.

Public power for electric car charging

2010-01-05T08:25:00.011-05:00

I have heard there is public access to power for slow chargers (so called "level one" charging) in Washington DC but we did not look them up on our trip. However I have seen them at the Lehigh Valley mall in Allentown PA and I hear the Saucon Valley mall and King of Prussia mall also has them. The security people have the electric Gem cars for patrolling, and a few spots are reserved next to their parking spots with 20 amp 120 volt GFI outlets by each one.

The photo was taken on Christmas Eve at Lehigh Valley mall, so it is not too surprising that someone parked in the spots reserved for charging electric cars. I will contact security at the mall to make sure a charging spot is available before driving the Mini E there and charging. These spots are just to the left of the Apple computer store, which is to the right of the photo frame.

It would be fun to get two or three Mini Es to go together and all charge at once.

The first LONG trip

2010-01-04T22:43:00.005-05:00

We got the roof rack and cargo carrier on Mini E #458 and headed off for the New Year's holiday. We stopped and used other fast charger's along the way and then the slow charger when we were far from New Jersey. Thanks to Ken and Amy, Joyce and Tom, Stephen and Phyllis and others for letting us charge on the way. I guess 200 miles in one day is not that much but without public infrastructure for fast charging, it was an adventure.

Not much impact on range from the roof top cargo carrier when driving reasonably slowly. Still getting 100+ plus mile range by also taking it easy on the heater. A lap blanket does wonders in addition to tricks mentioned in earlier posts.

Drove the E up to High Point

2009-12-22T22:04:00.004-05:00

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.

The cavalry is on the way

2009-12-21T23:07:00.006-05:00

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?

You can charge any car your want at Tom's restaurant

2009-12-20T00:04:00.004-05:00

OK, this is about line line voltage, but not mine!

We visited Mike Graham today. His line was 244 point something volts which is well within ANSI specs, although on the high side. I could charge #458 fine, but Mike's #269 would not charge. So the over-voltage threshold in his car has drooped even lower than mine in the cold, but his line voltage is also lower than my 253ish. So we have similar problems at our respective homes.

Tom's restaurant is nearby Mike's home so we went over there to finish charging and get some DELICIOUS food and peek at his line voltage. As Tom told me, since he has industrial 3 phase power, the single phase feed is lower with a nominal of 208 volts. (For the geeks, that is 120 volts times the square root of 3, for 3 phase.) Tom's line actually read 204 point something today. And of course, no trouble charging. No one ever has had trouble charging at Tom's restaurant. Because the voltage there is lower.

Mini, are you taking notes? There will be a quiz when you make your house call. I am handing you the answer to this charging problem on a silver platter here.

Oh by the way, this long drive in a BIG blizzard. That traction control is Great. The heater is not dependable. Goes cold now and then. Need to leave the fan up on three.

I hope this is the last post about line voltage

2009-12-18T22:11:00.002-05:00

Tonight I read the power line at about 250.1 volts and the Mini E would not even blink. Had to even dig out the clothes iron to get the line voltage down to 248 before she would charge.

It is nice to know what is going on finally with this charging problem. But it is rather frustrating to deal with and not without risks. I think this is the end of the data collection for me.

I think I got word through the ramparts and into engineering at Mini, although there is no confirmation. Had to use the back door to get someone to listen, but that is the way it is most places, including where I work. It is not an ideal situation, but the engineering department can get flooded with noise and distractions if the guards did not keep the Visigoths from the door.

Last night it worked

2009-12-18T06:47:00.003-05:00

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.

No dice tonight

2009-12-16T22:09:00.005-05:00

This was a test of charging tonight. I get home at zero range (although the gauge floats back up to 11% when I turn it off) and temperature just below freezing. This is usually the worst combination for getting the fast charger to work. I measure 250.8 volts, not as high as usual, but 1.6 volts higher than last night which was warmer. So I am not surprised when Mini E #458 won't even try to charge from the fast charger. Note that 250.8 is within the ANSI standard.

I turn on all the big loads in the house. Space heaters, toaster, the few incandescent lights that have not been switched to CFLs. Voltage drops to about 250 and when I plug in the car, it blinks a few times but then stops. Well at least it tried. It noticed the difference. Usually, if it won't even blink on the first try, there continues to be no response for 30 minutes with the big wall box "charger".

So I turn on everything in the house, even open the door of the fridge until I hear it start. Voltage down to 249.2, like it was yesterday (except I didn't have to turn on anything yesterday to get down to 249.2, maybe the neighbors had something big on yesterday). The car blinks 8 times, more than last try but then it stops. Still, this makes sense, it is colder tonight by maybe 15 degrees even though I got the voltage down to yesterday's value.

OK, put it on the 120 volt cord, I am out of time tonight. At least it only needed 10 minutes on 120 volts before it would switch to the higher voltage fast charger.

I have an 8000 watt heater I have not used in a while since the sauna turned into storage space. I'll have to clean it out so I can turn it on. An 8 kilowatt load should pull the power line down by several volts. Best part is, it is just one switch, not 50 things all over the house.

Voltage tolerance in North America

2009-12-15T14:31:00.006-05:00

I did find a spec for AC power line tolerance in North America, 114 to 126 volts. So technically my power line at home which is usually at 126.5 volts is too high, but I say AC Propulsion needs to be more tolerant in cold weather right after driving.

The Wikipedia link is here. The excerpt follows:

"In the United States[3] and Canada[4], national standards specify that the nominal voltage at the source should be 120 V and allow a range of 114 to 126 V (-5% to +5%). "

[3] ANSI C84.1: American National Standard for Electric Power Systems and Equipment—Voltage Ratings (60 Hertz)

Tonight my power line read below 250 volts, 249.2 to be precise. I had no trouble charging, it started immediately and kept going. I cannot remember the last time I did NOT have trouble with the fast charger. So this supports my theory. Then again, it was not so cold tonight. Tomorrow will tell. But maybe, just maybe Wile E. Coyote (my alter ego in this context) finally caught a valid theory.

Who knows why my line voltage was below 250 tonight. Coincidence? The idea that winter voltage is higher because all the Air Conditioners are off is interesting, but it does not explain why waiting will usually get the car to accept the fast charge. Then again, neither does my theory unless it is somehow related to battery voltage. And besides, I bet the power company regulates for load conditions.

I know waiting usually will get it to start charging again. But a couple times a month I take the boss out dancing when I get home from work with 1% charge left. If it doesn't start charging right away, we have to take the gas car. And she doesn't like the gas car anymore!

So you see, Mini, I had to figure it out myself. I couldn't wait for the house call. Because tomorrow night is dancing night. And it is very important to keep the boss happy! (That would be my wife.)

I finally caught the culprit

2009-12-13T22:31:00.003-05:00

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.

Throw out all the theories!

2009-12-12T18:17:00.004-05:00

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.

On the edge of the qualifications

2009-12-12T06:21:00.004-05:00

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.

Mini didn't find the problem, so they are coming to visit soon

2009-12-11T22:37:00.003-05:00

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.

Same problem charging, new car (temporarily)

2009-12-10T20:33:00.001-05:00

Well, loaner #008 does not have the problem that my #458 has with the rear defroster killing the radio with static, but the charging issue is even worse on #008 than on my #458.

Otherwise it drives exactly the same. Gets more notice with those decals.

I get #008 as a loaner? Not #007 ? But my name IS James!

2009-12-09T18:37:00.013-05:00

So my #458 went in for 13,000 mile routine maintenance today, and Jimmy G at Princeton Mini managed to get me another electric Mini as a loaner. Wow. Very nice. But maybe there was a practical reason in addition to Jimmy being such a great guy...

You see, I have been having charging trouble with #458 as a few others in New Jersey have. It has gotten quite consistent lately. Most days I get home and the Clipper Creek wall box trips the Ground Fault Protection when I plug in to charge, and the red indicator lights up on the wall box. At the very least, the wall box stays on but the Mini E's yellow charging light stops blinking after only 6 seconds, 8 seconds at the most.

Tonight I got home with loaner #008, pull into the garage and guess what? Six yellow blinks and the car stops charging. It did it twice. Third time and it goes on to complete charging. That is a fairly normal scenario when my #458 has trouble, unplug and try again a few times and it is OK. Sounds like the problem is in more than one car, and maybe something about my place makes it act up? But what could it be? The line voltage does not drop much when the car starts charging, I have measured it. And the 120 volt slow charger always works.

There was one funny thing today though: When I got home from work and plugged in before going to the dealer to drop off my #458, I parked OUTSIDE my garage and did NOT have trouble charging from 240 volts for the first time in WEEKS. But the loaner did have trouble when in the garage.

This is getting interesting. I rained very hard last night and today, but the sun came out on my way home. However, it usually takes days of warmer dry weather for the charging problem to go away. (My theory is moisture in the wiring or in the battery modules is causing a Ground Fault Interrupter to trip.)

So could there be a difference parking outside on the blacktop driveway that was in the sun versus inside on the damp concrete? Maybe damp concrete is a better conductor than sunny bitumen and with damp tires, any leaking electricity could get to ground and trip the safety protection and stop the charging? I don't usually get home when the sun is still up but I left early today so I could get the loaner on time.

OK, I'm not going to do anything for a couple days so I can see if things with loaner #008 are exactly the same as my #458 or not. (Hmm, maybe this is WHY they loaned me another electric Mini? To see if it has the same problem with my charging box?) Over the Christmas break I should have time to make some measurements in the Clipper Creek wall box with an oscilloscope, current probe and high voltage differential probes. But it is too busy right now, and I hear that Mini has started sending engineers to the garages of some Mini E drivers that are having charging problems. So maybe they will get to it before I do. I hope so. I am an electrical engineer, and I have a healthy fear of high voltages. I would rather they figure it out, but I am getting excited about fixing this and I might not be able to wait...

I can't stop wondering what would happen if I dry out the inside of the Clipper Creek box with a hair dryer. I had to do that months ago with the little yellow portable charging box, and it worked perfectly. (For the post about that episode click here.) But even if something like that works, it does not give specific enough information on the root cause of the problem.

Or maybe I will park on pieces of wood to see if that insulates the car and stops the Ground Fault trip. At least that would not destroy evidence like the dryer might.

Ah, I know! Next time it trips and the red indicator lights up on the Clipper Creek wall box, I will measure from a metal tire rim of the Mini to ground and see if there is any voltage that could trip the GFI. Charging always works after letting it sit for ten or twenty minutes, maybe that is long enough for the tires to dry off? If this finds leakage, I bet the leakage it is out of phase with the hot line from the 120 volt charging cord. That would explain why it only has trouble with 240 volt charging, the only wire that is leaking is the one that is grounded on the 120 volt box.

This sure is getting interesting. The solution is so close I can almost smell it. Being an engineer is fun. The future is almost here!

Anyway, they probably didn't make a # 007 Mini E... Or a # 013...

Hard data on the heater

2009-12-05T13:49:00.005-05:00

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.

120 miles and freezing at the start

2009-12-04T22:44:00.002-05:00

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.

109 miles on the freeway with 24 miles left.

2009-11-29T16:15:00.007-05:00

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.

We thank the drivers of #351 for generously allowing us to use not only their 50 amp charger, but also a regular 120 volt outlet for a small cabin heater. I took data while the car charged, something I have long wanted to do. The graph is above, a larger image is here.The gap near the beginning was while I plugged in the cabin heater.

Both my wife and I were surprised how easy it is to drive 55 mph or less on the New Jersey Turnpike and all the roads through New York city and Long Island. I averaged under 40 mph from door to door, which explains the very good range of about 133 miles. I had one person honk at me near a toll booth and only two or three people flash their lights. But an astonishing number of other cars fell in behind me in the right lane at a comfortable distance back and just STAYED there! Being the thanksgiving weekend there was plenty of traffic, the Southern State Parkway backed up a couple times each direction. Not sure what this might be like during rush hour...

Of course we did not use the built in heater while driving until very near our destination. See my previous posts about staying warm on long drives. Of course on shorter trips we use the heater as in conventional cars since there is plenty of juice available.

We have 3 choices, but we always choose the electric

2009-11-26T20:33:00.003-05:00

I want to echo something that other bloggers who have multiple cars have mentioned.

My wife and I each have a conventional four cylinder car. Both cars work fine, both get over 30 miles per gallon. But they don't get used much since the Mini E arrived.

Like other electric car bloggers, the first choice for us is always the Mini E. Shopping is fine, there is plenty of room. Besides the far back which holds at least three grocery bags, there is a surprising amount of room UNDER the seats. (Be careful to comply with Mini's instructions NOT to block the battery vents by piling up things BEHIND the seat). If you take a regular paper grocery bag and fill it only half full with the top folded down, it will probably fit nicely under the seat from the back. Depends on how far back you put the seat maybe. Of course, if only one of us is out shopping there is lots of room in the passenger area. I have to buckle the passenger seat belt if there is a heavy bag on it to stop the seat belt reminder. But my wife and I usually shop together and there is still plenty of room.

Now, we are not the types who do all of our shopping at one store. We tend to buy produce at our locally owned, small "Organic Only" store, there are some things we prefer to get from Trader Joe's, some things from Whole Foods market, and a few things from the main stream Shop Rite or Stop & Shop and so on. And since most of these stores are in different directions, it is easy to go home between trips and unload.

And on almost every other trip we make, we will take the Mini E if it is around. It is always charged, our kids are grown and out of the house so two seats are enough. So shopping, going out dancing or to the movies or a restaurant, to church, to social events, it is always the Mini E. And the range is more than enough. My 120 mile round trip commute to work is the only thing that gets close to the range limit. The only exceptions so far have been going to the airport. Well, even for that we usually take the train anyway since it is cheaper than long term parking and often as fast.

For many years we have had three cars in the house. One for the kids and one each for us parents. We are keeping three for now since the Mini E is experimental and a backup is required. I don't know how many families are really single car households, I bet not many in the middle class. I expect most have at least two cars these days except in dense city centers. I bet for most multi car households, a 2 seat electric would be the car of choice for daily use as it has been for us.

We have needed the range of the gas car just once in several months for a long trip.

Rain strategies and charger sharing

2009-11-26T11:45:00.001-05:00

I have had three visits now from other Mini E drivers stopping by to charge up, two of the three were traveling for business. I expect to start calling around to charge at other locations soon. Thanks again for the charger sharing site, whoever did that.

Since the heavy rain last week and drizzle since, I have been having a little trouble getting the Mini E to start charging at 240 volts again. For quite a while while it was dry I had no trouble. But whenever it refuses by blinking a few times and then stopping, I can always get it to charge from the 120 volt cord right away. After a few minutes of that (when I assume the damp connectors are drying out) it will continue charging when I switch back to 240 volts. So for me this continues to be little more than an annoyance, althogh I know other driver are quite frustrated by the same or worse troubles.

Mini, have you figured out which cable is causing the problem yet? Hmmm? Is engineering working on this? I might have to get out my hair dryer and figure it out for you soon.

A word about the windows fogging up in the rain when using the recirculate button to keep the car warmer: One big advantage of preheating the car with "shore power" and a small 900 watt car heater is that it really dries out the car. It also takes a lot less battery power to maintain warmth in the car than it does to heat it up from cold, so there is little range impact.

But when the windows eventually fog up as the car cools down, I have good luck simply using the fan on lowest setting with no heat and the air directed to the windshield. It has been raining for days in NJ and PA, and still I can complete my one hour and 40 minute drive to work without using the heater at all,and keeping the front and side windows clear by only using the fan about 20% of the time or less. The rear defogger is another matter, I am finally starting to use that. I need to measure the rear defogger power consumption one of these days...

The pattern is clear: Moisture

2009-11-19T22:27:00.002-05:00

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.

Charge problem? Cycle the "ignition"

2009-11-08T20:17:00.002-05:00

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!

Three tries to start charging tonight

2009-11-05T21:10:00.003-05:00

Maybe it was the rain, I don't know. Almost 5 minutes passed tonight from turning off the Mini until plugging in the cord, and then 5 blinks and charging stopped. I waited 15 seconds and tried again, still no go. I came back in two minutes, plugged in again and it started up and kept going this time.

I have not seen the red blinking light for awhile on the Clipper Creek box that others have reported lately. Maybe the AC Propulsion box can sense leakage itself, and stops charging. (This is my moisture theory, it was raining tonight.) I guess I should leave the key in so the display will light up in case there is an icon or message.

I did look at the charging port with a flash light but there did not seem to be moisture. Maybe I should take a hair dryer to it anyway.

Since I had this problem before and after the flying doctor changed my Magic Box last time, I suspect the issue is in the battery (moisture?) or just a software problem. I am not buying Mini's guess in their last email that the voltage from the power company is low. When that happens, the Clipper Creek box stops the charge and it restarts by itself. The problem I am seeing is the car stopping the charging process and it won't restart until the connector is removed and reinserted.

Secret "weapon" revealed

2009-11-05T20:32:00.004-05:00

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.

Too Bad. I am happy I got a Mini E anyway. I'm sure the production version will be better.

And the photo above is one way I say "I am a pioneer!". I'll post a photo of my Sorels later. Just started wearing them this morning. Sweet on the feet, and you know what? There IS enough room on the accelerator pedal for the King of snowmobile boots, without hitting the brake at the same time.

The only time I used the heater in today's cold weather was when the windshield got foggy in the rain. And all it takes is maybe 3 notches up from the coldest, which is in the middle of the blue range of the knob. Yes, there is some heat when it is still in the blue, at least as far as the windshield is concerned. Doesn't affect the driving range much until you get to the red. And yes, that is 3 notches while keeping the recirculate on as much as I can.

By the way, I wonder is the auto off for the recirculate is needed in summer to keep the batteries cool? Mini, can you kill the auto off for the recirculate when the ambient and battery temperatures are cold? Thank you.

I have not decided where to "wear" my heater, shown in its fully charged shape. Lately I wear it under my sweater. Lap is possible, not as effective maybe. Maybe I should try it on my head? No, too heavy. I believe the most common use is for feet while sleeping. Can't do that while driving, hence the Sorels.

I am seeing some reduction in range, but I think it is mostly because the change in time (driving home in the dark since daylight saving time ended) has cost me my patience. I am driving faster. But maybe it is the cold.

With some luck I will put away the hot water bottle soon. The facility manager at my work place has a quote from Clipper Creek on a 208 volt 50 amp "EVSE" (charging interface box) just like the one Mini installed in my garage. I should know in a week or so if they will put it in or not. If they do I can go back to living like there are no seasons, wearing short sleeves in January. Ah, the good life, huh?

Something in this Minnesota boy LIKES wearing wool underwear and driving with no heat. Especially when it takes money away from oil producing countries that hate us. And I like to show mother nature that "I am a pioneer!"

I have not explained the issue clearly enough to Mini

2009-11-02T19:48:00.001-05:00

Mini sent their weekly email, which basically said that if your car does not keep charging just wait and it will restart by itself.

I doubted this in a reply to their email but I don't expect them to answer.

And I had the issue again tonight. I waited as they said. 30 minutes and it did NOT restart. I pulled out the plug and stuck it back in and all is well.

It is increasingly clear that my issue is time between turning off the car and starting to charge. It is not (in my case anyway) low voltage from the power company. When I plugged in tonight the car started blinking as it does when charging and then stopped after a few seconds. Both power phases were slightly above 125 volts and within 0.2 volts of each other, so that is not the issue as Mini suggested in their last mass email.

For over a week I made a point of plugging in the car the moment I turned it off and had no trouble with charging. Today I went back to taking my notes before plugging in which means several minutes wait after turning off and before charging, and the problem returned.

I will start timing how long of a delay from power off until plugging in a then log whether there is an issue with charging. This should give Mini enough info to reproduce the issue. In any case waiting does get around the problem but not without intervention. I do need to remove and replace the connector.

Dirty power problem?

2009-10-30T21:32:00.003-04:00

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.

Brown out protection

2009-10-25T19:46:00.002-04:00

We had a visit yesterday during the rain from Don (#364) who stopped by for a recharge. While we were eating diner, I noticed the lights dim for a second. This is not unusual during a lightning storm, but I went to peek at #364 and sure enough, the Clipper Creek box was doing its job and stopped charging for a minute. A few mintes later it restarted automatically. I had not witnessed this before.

This is a built in feature of the Clipper Creek box that goes beyond what the Society of Automotive Engineers require in specification J1772, which governs Electric Vehicle Service Equipment. The interface box (EVSE) detects brown out conditions (probably due to a lightning strike or someone hitting a power pole in the rain) and suspends charging for a random time, making it easier for the utilities to get power back up to specified voltages.

This is not a big deal yet, but when there are millions of electric cars on the road, this will be one of several Big Deals for power grid stability.

And you guys that are complaining about the empty space in the box (many on the Tesla forums) - the Clipper Creek box was designed back in the 1990s in the era of the EV1 from GM. Back then, the electronics to do all the safety functions took up all the room in that box. They redesigned the electronics onto a smaller board when this second wave of EV's started, but with the low volumes at present, it does not make sense to tool up a new casting for the enclosure when the old one works.

And I wonder if maybe the extra room in there might come in handy for the Vehicle to Grid functions that are coming, and other smart metering that can save us money as drivers? We'll see.

Taking the freeway round trip for the first time

2009-10-24T13:34:00.004-04:00

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.

Update on minor charging problem

2009-10-21T18:54:00.003-04:00

I heard from #364 that he regularly has a problem starting the car after it has been off for only several minutes. The talk is that the battery pack goes into cell balancing mode or something for a few minutes if it thinks you are gone. Wait just a few minutes more and everything is fine. Can be a problem at times.

I noticed this once when I ran a short errand. The current theory is that the same thing can happen to the charging process. I usually take a few minutes when I get home and write down every number I can read out of the dash display, and some other things (see the link for "#458 Trip Log" at the right). So as the battery pack ages (I am at about 8500 miles now) the cell balancing happens more often. Two days now I have tried plugging in the charge cable as soon as I get out of the car, and both times it has charged all night. No problem.

This could be random, we will see in a few days.

Mini, any comments?

Any other drivers had these observations?

By the way, after some measurements and a talk with the good folks at Clipper Creek, I am certain there is nothing wrong with the wall box.

Interior preheat

2009-10-18T18:45:00.006-04:00

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.

Maybe it is the wall box?

2009-10-15T19:37:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-10-10T20:17:00.004-04:00

I have continued to have trouble getting Mini E #458 to start charging from the 240 volt wall box when the battery is below 30%, which happens every work day. The small 120 volt portable charger always works, and after running it for a while I can switch to the 240 volt unit. So something is wrong and tomorrow the car goes in for a checkup.

Then something new a couple days back. My wife took the "spirit powered" Mini E to work so I could take her conventional "fire and brimstone" powered car in for service, since her dealer is near my work place. Her drive is one tenth of mine, which is as it should be. So she got home with over 80% charge remaining on the Mini E, and she still had trouble getting it to start charging. I turned the setting down to 12 amps with the 240 volt charging box and this time it kept charging, but that might be coincidence.

Often what happens is that it will start charging but then stops after the blinking charge lamp on the dash has blinked 6 times. Sometimes it will go for ten blinks and stop. But once it blinks for more than 12 times, it will keep going until the battery is at 100%.

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...

2009-10-10T19:58:00.003-04:00

I drive the Mini E quite a lot, maybe too much. I have driven it about 8000 miles over 4 months. So it has started to feel like a normal car to me. And when I get in a conventional piston car again, I wonder how I ever was able to stand it. Sort of like when someone says "how did we live without mobile phones?" OK, it is silly but that is the feeling. Feelings can be silly.

Now my wife only drives the Mini E on the weekends, and she still marvels at how much more welcoming it is, and easy to drive. Yesterday she was searching for words, and said something to the effect that she feels she could do anything in this car, like drive across the corn field we were passing, since everything else is so effortless.

I was starting to wonder if I should check to see if there was something funny in her green tea until I realized that I had become accustomed to the luxury of electric drive, while she was still marveling at the difference from combustion drive.

BMW, listen up! You should investigate using electric drive EVEN WITHOUT much of a battery. Just put a generator on the engine and an electric motor on the wheels, with the smallest battery in between that you can get away with. It will sell on the basis of improved drivability alone. There is a market for this beyond the environmental nuts like us. And it will help obtain economies of scale in the electric drive train.

This is most notable off the interstate highways, and on hilly roads. Despite cruise control, a conventional car requires you to reach for the brake on downhill sections. Even with an automatic transmission, the shifting is always noticeable on hilly slower roads. Not so with electric drive. The marketing guys should use the word "effortless".

Charge while eating?

2009-10-07T13:04:00.000-04:00

I was at a restaurant recently when I was low on charge. I noticed an outdoor outlet right next to an empty parking spot. I went inside and asked if I could plug in, and as usual the answer was yes.

Except that this outlet was the exception, it was not working.

Reminds me of the old saw, "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak". Something like that. Here is becomes "the management is willing but the maintenance is weak". Ha ha.

I got home with 15 miles of range left.

Charge time at 240 volts 12 amps

2009-09-29T21:22:00.006-04:00

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.

Staying warm

2009-09-29T21:10:00.001-04:00

Mini wants the air recirculation control off most of the time. I agree generally, especially in combustion powered cars where carbon monoxide poisoning is always a danger.

But in the Mini E the story is a little different. First, the colder September weather now in the North East US means using the cabin heater. And I can stay warmer while using less power when the air is recirculating. Besides, the battery ventilation is always pulling air out of the cabin, even if only through air leaks when the air is set to recirculate.

Now I would like to use heat with the cabin air fan off, since the lowest setting is still too high for these 40 degree mornings. The battery fan draws enough air though the cabin ventilation vents. But the heater won't come on without the cabin air fan being on. So the next best way to reduce cold air ingress is to use the recirculation button.

Of course, Mini set it on a timer to turn off after 5 minutes or so. When I notice it getting cold again, I push it again.

There are conventional Minis where I work, so I'll have to ask if this functions the same way on the gasoline powered models which have waste heat to spare.

I would like to see a reversible air flow where battery heat could go into the cabin, but maybe that would not work. Maybe that was too much to get into a prototype. In any case, the heater load appears to be much smaller than I expected. I always assumed the heater in winter would be the Achilles' heel of electric cars. So far from my measurements (see earlier posting) the heater load looks small.

Running on empty

2009-09-25T23:06:00.004-04:00

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.

Heater power consumption at lowest setting

2009-09-21T10:24:00.002-04:00

One hour twenty five minutes of only heater use with lowest fan and lowest heat setting consumed 4% of charge. The cabin temperature went from 47 degrees F to 64.

Headlight power consumption

2009-09-19T22:24:00.004-04:00

Four hours of only headlights on consumed 3% of charge.

I don't think we need to worry about headlights reducing the range noticeably.

Heater power consumption

2009-09-19T17:44:00.003-04:00

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.

The monsoon is over

2009-09-03T18:47:00.003-04:00

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.

109.4 mile average range

2009-09-01T21:14:00.002-04:00

I now have data on thirty trips to work where I started at 100% charge. (Click on the title of this posting to see the spreadsheet if you want the details.) Most of these trips were about 60 miles, mostly not on the freeway and averaging just below 40 mph with the stop signs and lights. A few included some freeway travel, but the best I can do with out going well out of my way is about half on the freeway.

The average of trip distance plus estimated remaining miles upon arriving at work is 109.4 miles. This is for mid June through August traveling in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Some use of AC, some not, for that level of detail see the log spreadsheet.

For those who have not seen the display in the Mini E dash board, the photo at the top of my blog's main page shows the best estimated range I have achieved. It takes a couple cycles of driving at average speeds in the low 30 mph region for the estimate to creep up to that 140+ mile level. But I can reliably exceed 120 miles on one charge just by driving gently. I usually don't, but I can at any time.

Other bloggers have said they checked range when using "hyper-mile" techniques but only for 10 miles or so. The only accurate way is to start at 100% charge and hyper-mile until you reach zero. Or hyper-mile for well over a hundred miles on several charge cycles and then the estimated range reflects how you have been driving. You can't spend most of your time as a "lead foot" and then hyper-mile for a short distance and expect the averaging algorithms to catch up that quickly. The estimates would bounce all over the place if the filtering time constant were that short.

Big Ears?

2009-08-30T12:07:00.002-04:00

I have been experimenting with a lot of different routes to commute to work. While I have managed to cut a couple miles from my trip, I have also gotten some evidence about how much quieter an electric car is.

Not that much from the outside at speed.

I often I take back roads to work through Bucks county in Pennsylvania. There are a fair number of people out walking their dogs, jogging, or just walking. And guess what?

They all hear me coming. Probably from just as far away as if I were in a piston powered car.

Don’t get me wrong, the Mini E is much quieter, especially on the inside, especially if the windows are closed, and especially when accelerating or when moving really slowly (which does not make much tire noise).

But a lot of modern cars are fairly quiet these days when cruising at light throttle. And tire noise at speed is not going to change much based on the motive power source. I suspect that people who are facing away from me are hearing my tire noise when they walk to the edge of the road long before I get close. These are not high speed roads, usually 35 to 40 mph. Maybe 45 tops, some 25.

And the Mini E is not completely quiet at very low speed either, there is a whirring sound when under power even at a fraction of one mile per hour. I suspect it might be the cooling fan, maybe someone more familiar with AC Propulsion’s system can comment. I wonder if this fan noise (or whatever it is) is audible to the average pedestrian. On the other hand, if you don’t touch the throttle, there is no whirring noise below one mph. Although the battery cooling fan always seems to run, though more quietly in the cooler weather now.

Constant speed versus constant fuel?

2009-08-22T07:38:00.004-04:00

Accelerator pedal position in the Mini E is very nearly constant when cruising. It might be close to what engineers would call a constant speed control. By contrast, my foot moves a lot when driving a piston powered car in the hills at steady speed. Perhaps the accelerator pedal in a piston car is closer to a constant fuel rate per stroke, and then the vehicle speed varies widely with engine speed, terrain, gear selection, wind, etc. if the pedal does not move.

I have commented to friends about how easy the Mini E is to drive because of the nearly stationary position of my right foot, but I had not mentioned it in this blog until now. Well, last week when my wife was driving she observed that the Mini E brought to mind that old Irish verse "May the road rise to meet you". It never really made any sense to her and maybe it is a bad literal translation but that fact that the car goes up hills so easily without the driver even having to press the pedal any harder brought the verse to mind.

(I'm starting to get slightly worried that my wife likes this car more than she likes me. The law of unintended consequences is always lurking. Perhaps I am not as easy to get along with as the Mini E. Ha ha. Maybe I should learn from my car.)

I have paid very close attention and when I hold my foot as steady as I can, the Mini E does slow slightly on up hills and speed up slightly on down hills. But only slightly and much less than any other car. I missed not having cruise control at first, but figured it was one of those features that they just did not get to in time. Every prototype project has some features that don't get done in time. But with this car, you hardly miss cruise control.

There is a bounce at the bottom of the charge gauge

2009-08-14T21:29:00.006-04:00

Since a Mini E engineer encouraged me not to hesitate to run the batteries all the way down, I have been watching for an opportunity to do so. The charge estimation algorithms have been very reliable and my range awareness has become quite comfortable. A couple days ago I had the chance to go for zero.

On the way home from work, the charge gauge hit zero at about 5 miles from home. No sweat, everything kept moving right along. I was not on the freeway (I rarely am) and I was expecting some sort of limited road speed but nope, I was driving as usual. Then the fun part: I came to a stop light and while waiting, the gauge crept up a few %. Drive on, it goes back to zero, a downhill, and it creeps up a couple %. This kept going all the way home. It never went negative and when I parked at home and started scribbling down all the numbers from the display that you can find in my logs, it crept up to 3% before I plugged in.

This reminds me a bit of the absolute value of the SINC function, for any of you math geeks out there. Of course at some point the charge gauge will droop into the negative range but I'll have to push it harder to get there. And I don't care for fast driving, so we'll have to wait until the next time that I'm late for a 7 AM meeting and HAVE to take the freeway to work. The freeway only saves me a few minutes, but it is many more miles and leaves me at low charge on the way home.

The bottom line is that the Mini E range is probably better than most of us drivers of it realize. And it is not at all like the sudden death overtime of driving a piston car burning "Satan's saliva" (petroleum that is). When you get too low on liquid fuel, your car suddenly stops. The Mini E might slow down, but not at all suddenly. Maybe it is more like a horse when it gets tired. But Mini E 458 didn't even slow down, it just bounced off the trampoline at the bottom of the charge gauge.

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.

80% charging efficiency at highest rate, 60% at lowest

2009-08-11T19:46:00.005-04:00

Today I turned off every circuit breaker except for the smoke detectors and the clock radio, then recorded the power company watt hour meter. I read 14% charge remaining when I plugged in the car, and took another reading when the charge rate slowed down at 98% and we really wanted to turn on the central AC again.

I read total power used as 29.3 kilowatt hours for adding 84% charge. By the way this took 2 hours 32 minutes at 50 amps. Sorry, I did not get a precise voltage reading. So:

29.3 / 0.84 = 34.88 KwHr needed to charge from 0% to 100% by extrapolation.

The Mini E spec sheet says usable battery capacity is about 28 KwHr. If we define charging efficiency as usable energy available after charging divided by energy input while charging, I get:

28 / 34.88 = 0.8 or 80% efficiency.

This is very good. I did a similar measurement long ago with the 120 volt charging cable when that was all I had and got a number closer to 60%, presumably due to the fans running just as hard but being a higher fraction of the available charging power.

The 2.9 hour charge time given for the highest charge rate seems to be quite accurate for 0% to 100% charge. However, the 23.6 hour charge time given for the low rate 120 volt charger seems to correspond to charging from 30% (when the first low battery alarm comes on) to 100% by my measurements. I extrapolate to about 37.5 hours for charging from 0% to 100% with the 120 volt box. Of course, this would depend on ambient temperature since that can affect fan speed. I'll meaasure again when it cools down in the autumn. The high rate charge time might be less affected by temperature between 40 and 100 F.

The real point of all this is trying to estimate how much of an effect terrain and start stop driving have on range versus the effect of speed. Assuming that regenerative braking is as or more efficient than the high rate charger, I am guessing that 80% efficiency goes a long way towards removing the effect of hills and start stop driving. High speed might be the bigger cost to range.

And by the way, I once figured the max regen rate works out to about 20 Kw, which is much higher than the 12 Kw max charge rate for the wall box. So efficiency might be above 80% for regenerative braking.

I had thought I should strive not to go below 30% battery charge since that is where the low battery warnings start. But one of the Mini engineers at a Mini E social event encouraged me to run it as low as I want, even into the negative area. He insisted the battery was fully protected and I would only lose speed at very low charge levels. I usually get home in the 20% vicinity. You can see the details in my trip logs. (Click on the title line of the oldest posting.) I have noticed limited acceleration when passing when I am below 20% but never any sense of a speed limit yet. Some day I'll get the nerve to get down to 'zero' charge or below. Not this week.

Minor EMC issue

2009-08-10T19:57:00.006-04:00

At 3600 miles, I finally found a complaint, however minor.

The rear window defogger can wipe out radio reception. Specifically, driving from Princeton to Hopewell NJ and listening to 88.1 or 90.9 works only when the rear window defogger is off.

I have not run into this in other cars, although a colleague with long automotive experience has.

If this is the worst of the problems, it only reinforces what an excellent job they have done on this prototype vehicle.

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.

Qualitative Comments

2009-08-08T19:18:00.004-04:00

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!"

Battery temperature

2009-08-07T15:38:00.004-04:00

I do not drive much on the freeway, but I had to yesterday. After charging the Mini E all day at work as usual, the battery temperature was 104 degrees F when I left. I have sun shades in the windshield and on one side window, but it is still fairly warm in the car even with the fan running while the batteries charge.

On the freeway I was driving rather aggressively, and saw the battery temperature peak at 109 degrees F about three quarters of the way through my 68 mile trip. Now this is fine, the car ran perfectly, the AC is very strong, range is great. But 109 degrees is close to what I recall as the limit for regenerative braking to function.

So I question the wisdom in the owners manual of recommending that the windows always be fully closed when the car is parked. If I did not have the car plugged in and charging, it would be much hotter in there without the fan. Has anyone else gotten into a high enough temperature that they lost regen? The only blog I have read about loss of regen was related to problem that was repaired.

So I leave the windows slightly open if there is no rain in the forecast. And if rain is expected, it is usually cloudy enough that the car stays cooler even with the windows closed fully.

But I would like to know from Mini if the fan always exhausts interior air to the outside to cool the batteries? Would it work better to reverse the fan when the inside of the car is hotter than the outside? Can the battery fan reverse in winter to heat the cabin when the batteries get hot? (Maybe the batteries don't get that hot in winter.)

It is rare for me to drive aggressively, so I don't think I'll see these high battery temperatures again. I suspect that Mini or BMW will go to a liquid cooled battery when they come out with a production electric car. But they seem to have done a very nice job for a prototype.

And I love the fact that the car stays as cool as it does parked in the sun when it is plugged in. Too bad the AC won't run when it is charging but it is hardly needed in my experience. Maybe I should get in interior thermometer and put some more numbers in this post...

Portable charger not completely water proof

2009-08-05T19:42:00.005-04:00

Several weeks back there was a heavy rain at work before I left for home. The 120 volt charger was lying flat on the concrete, face up and the car was still charging when I unplugged it. When I got home, the 120 volt charger would not start, both red LEDs were blinking which means an internal fault. (This was before the wall mounted charger was installed.)
Knowing what happened, I unplugged the charger, carefully opened the case, and poured out the water. I dried it with a hair dryer set on low for about ten minutes and it was fine.

The gasket and grommets look perfect, I don't know where the leak is. Normally I hang the charger from the strap when it looks like rain, but this day I did not.

One of the GFI outlets at work that I use to charge the car started tripping a few weeks ago. I thought at first that one of the guys was pulling a practical joke by pressing the 'test" button on the GFI, since I had charged at that outlet many times with no trouble. But now I suspect that moisture in the yellow box caused the external GFI to trip before it got so bad that the yellow box decided it had an internal problem. That outlet seems to be working again now that I dried out the yellow box.

In the photo you can also see the meter I use. I have to pay for the electricity I consume at work. The extension cord is 12 gauge, with screw terminal connectors. It does not get warm. The owner's manual warns not to use extension cords, but this one is sufficiently over rated. Most molded connectors on extension cords from the hardware store will over heat after a few hours at 12 amps, so I agree in principal with the owner's manual. But the outdoor outlets at work have spring loaded covers and I cannot get the power meter in directly, so I use this heavy extension cord.

Detailed trip logs

2009-08-02T14:25:00.005-04:00

Central New Jersey might be the last location to get wall chargers installed for the Mini E. Something about the inspectors being fussy here. For various reasons I delayed blogging about Mini E #458 until my 50 amp charger was installed, which happened two days ago.

So far I have been driving my 120 mile round trip commute only 3 days a week due to the long charge time at 120 volts. We also drive on the weekend but usually less than 100 miles total. With the big charger I should be putting 3000 miles per month on the car.

I had my first problem last weekend when the car refused to charge. I still had only the "baby" charger at the time. It still drove fine, so I dropped it at the dealer on Monday night where it also refused to charge with their "adult" 50 amp charger. They checked it in Tuesday morning, sounds like the "flying doctor" checked it out on Wednesday, Thursday it was fixed and Friday we picked it up.

The dealer says I was the first to take delivery in Princeton, and the first to bring it in for the 3000 mile check up. If I had not had the charging problem, I would have been over 3000 when I went in for service, instead of just under 3000 miles on the odometer.

I have never seen a car as anything more than a mobile appliance. Much the same for my wife. We used biodiesel in an old Mercedes for 4 years before now, and that was interesting and a little annoying. The Mini E is the first car either of us has been impressed with. Of course it is mostly about the fuel, but the car is well executed in most respects. This is the future.

My trip log is linked, click on the title of this post "Detailed Trip Logs" above. It will open a Google Spreadsheet. You can see that I don't always get a range over 140 miles, but I get a very dependable 120 mile range when I'm not in a hurry. Analysis and summary to come in later posts.