Check out this video from Popular Mechanics about a lithium ion-powered MINI Cooper designed by Hybrid Technologies:
(This MINI) sports a 78kW electric motor, can get up to 200 miles on a charge and recharges in six to eight hours. Inside, the only real changes to the Mini interior are that the back seats are gone (your batteries are now your ì+2î) and the gas gauge now reads permanently empty because as far as your vehicleís instrument cluster is concerned, you have no gas.
Now that’s pretty cool. This is the one electric I would definitely consider… Price still needs to come down a bit though. Range seems good enough for city driving, but not for road trips. I wonder what the downtime is?
Alex
…be hell to mod it!
Just throw some Minspeed HD’s and roll with style 🙂
5 seconds from the end of the video, the MINI almost gets nailed by a cab.
For a car coming from a company called Hybrid Technologies, it doesn’t sound like the car is a hybrid. I’ll need it to do more than 200miles if I were to take it out of town.
I agree – 200 miles is nothing for an out of town trip, but excellent commuter car. If anything, this shows what is possible :).
The cabbies in NYC, cones to a MINI…
digging more into this I found an blurb in mobile magazine which states that it only needs 5 hours to fully recharge and that the batteries use a lithium/polymer not lithium/ion, which means there’s no liquid there. Very Green indeed! Here’s the link: http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/354/C12440/