Electric Mini Cooper Has Rough Start

TopSpin writes "BMW's limited roll out of the electric version of its Mini has met with complaints from early adopters including less than advertised range, cold weather charging problems, bulky batteries and connection issues. Richard Steinburg, BMW's manager of electric vehicle operations, assures everyone that the manufacturer is 'learning quite a bit as we go.' Drivers are paying $850/month for the privilege of helping BMW learn how to build EVs, while also helping BMW meet alternative fuel mandates so that other models can continue to be sold in select markets."

Comments

Re:Electric car with problems?

[dasunt]

Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces? The problem is sloved. Just moved. Biodiesel, ethanol/switchgass, and plant based fuels make so much more sense.

Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.

Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.

So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.

Re:Electric car with problems?

[wizardforce]

No surprise there. Corn is horrifyingly inefficient for producing Ethanol as a fuel. Ethanol is highly miscible with water making extraction of the fuel its self rather energy intensive to say nothing of the production of fertilizers etc being petroleum derived. Algae biodiesel and mycodiesel show much more promise. The mycodiesel can run off a cellulose feedstock which is handy because that's mostly what you have as a by-product of extracting the lipids from algae. The lipids are fairly hydrophobic so extraction from a liquid medium isn't that hard. The only real problem is efficiently breaking the cells and pressing the oils out of them. Another option is drying the algae and reforming the material using thermal depolymerization and fischer tropsch reactions to synthesize hydrocarbons among many other useful chemicals. There's even a patent on using a strain of bacteria that can produce ethanol from syngas which is a product of the thermal depolymerization. iofuels aren't dead, the important game changing ones are just ignored in favor of that failure named corn derived ethanol.