BMW offers e-Mini tryouts to UK drivers

Fancy an electric Mini for six months? Well, now's your chance because BMW is taking applications to be one of the 20 lucky folk who will make up Round One of its UK leccy Mini field trials. Applicants must reside within the rough triangle formed by Andover, Oxford and West London and must have a private garage, car port or …

[Feef Lovecraft]

Field test in a Small area of South East

England only.

Ahh well i'll continue to finance the taxman and kill the planet.

[John Chadwick]

Wow

And to think my 70mpg Golf wouldn't even have cost me that at 100% finance and three year service contract, and it has 4 seats and an 800 range.

(Do you get the electricity free?)

Have BMW got any takers, and are they real people who actually have to drive a car to make their living.

Perhaps they should have done a deal with Foxton's.

[paul derry]

No back seats? No problem ...

... you couldn't fit a bag of shopping in the back seats of a mini anyway! Great cars those minis, as long as you don't have kids.

[Anonymous Coward]

site down?

I don't care where they weant me too live I'm still gonna apply..

why? cos it shows demand!

[burundi]

wtf

is it just me or have they gone slightly mental.

[Al 14]

Ok but...

... I'm all for electric cars but I'm suspicious about what BMW are doing. It's not like they are doing tests on a production car, I think they've knocked this together pretty quick to get some free publicity. I doubt whether they need any 'real world' data - they know these things basically work and will work very well within the parameters in a model that's not just knocked together. It's only huge volume production of batteries and controllers and a better value proposition that's holding this kind of car back.

[Richard Porter]

£330 a month?

I doubt if I spend much more than £330 a year on my car, excluding fuel. And it's Mini-based (classic of course). And it holds many bags of shopping, picnic and camping gear, club stand stuff, etc., etc.

[IT_Frogman]

London Only?

Typical London-Centric Attitude again.

To make this realistic they should test it up here in Yorkshire where the hills are steep and the battery would be punished :)

[Anonymous Coward]

BMW Obviously know

... that "their" car will completely fail anywhere except London because it doesn't have the grunt needed for streets that aren't paved with gold.

Who would want a BMW anyway? Overpriced pieces of status symbol driven by those that have to compensate for deficiencies in the trouser department.

[Al 14]

No

Actually this London vs 'real' roads thing is nonsense. What is likely is that this car would get about 50 miles fully charged on a 'hard' drive, but won't fail to climb a hill properly. If it's your second car, i.e the one you use to commute that's probably ok. Do some research, the problems with electric vehicles are not power, but range and cost, problems that do not seem too large since there's no fundamental physics or economics getting in the way.

[Pete James]

Before another avalanche starts.....

It's pretty reasonable for the company to ask that testers live in a specific area close to their main office in Bracknell as well as making it easy for them to have one deal with a utility company to do the power hook up.

What is not reasonable is for the company to charge people for the honour of road testing a car.

[Anonymous Coward]

BMW's are fun to drive!

Wtf does this have to do with IT? Please, el reg, who cares about "leccy" cars that are not production ready? What does it have to do with IT?

Back to the story ....

BMW's are fun to drive, that's what the German ads say, I don't think so personally, though. I have driven a 318T coupe, 120d and a X3 3.0 ... I've sat on the passenger seat of a X5 top of the range with every possible option (the big boss') and no, I do not like sitting in BMW's, let alone driving them. Citroen offered the greatest driving pleasure with the CX GTI but they have not managed too well since then.

I stick to the complete opposite ... a small 106. I pay more for my iphone a month than for me car ... ;-), and I could afford a Golf/A3 type of car, maybe even Passat, A4 if I cut some expenses ... ;-) - I live in town, don't need a car .... I'm thinking of selling it, btw so does anyone want a 2001 106 with 65 000 km? You'd have to come and pick it up in France ... Get a discount for reading el reg ... if you are from the UK you get a full 20% price increase, consider yourself lucky, it's not as bad as UK ripoff ... ;-)

Evil g8s, because that guy is evil!