The BMW Mini E

It's Here!
Mini E #066 Arrives
6/15/2009

Finally, the long-anticipated day arrives! Mini E #066 came home today from Crevier Mini in Santa Ana, after about an hour and a half of paperwork and final instructions from our friendly sales guy, Christian Banks.

The final instructions turned out to be very useful! Having had only experienced driving American and Japanese cars thus far, we're not sure which of the peculiarities of the layout of the controls are due to the fact that it's a Euro-design, and which are unique to the high-tech electric version of the Mini. It looks like this is one time we'll have to carefully read the manual!

The first thing we tried after Jean got the car home was to plug it into our charger. Everything seems functional, but it's clear we need to do something about the cable management. The charger cord is stiffer, longer, and heavier than the charging cords which came with the inductive chargers we've used before. It will clearly be a big pain to have to coil and uncoil the cable each time for charging.

The other problem we have with our charger location on the right wall of the garage is that if the car is parked nose-in, the charger cord will have to come diagonally across the car to reach the charging port, which is located at the left rear of the car. I'm thinking at the moment that I'll have to come up with some way to leave the cord suspended above the car (like the nozzle of a gas pump) so it doesn't have to be dragged over or around the car each time the car needs charging.