MINI Electric: Is It Possible to Live with a Short-Range EV in Winter Without Home Charging?
Hello it’s Martin from wisely automotive and behind me is the mini electric this is in fact my new company car and I potentially made a stupid decision why because just like most londoners I do not have off street parking so I will have to rely on the public charging
Infrastructure to get me through with a car which by modern EV standards doesn’t have the best range about 100 Mil on a charge doesn’t charge the fastest 50 KW on DC rapid Chargers and lastly we are in the middle of November so we are literally about to go into winter where
EVS tend to have the worst range and suffer the most so this is totally unscripted I don’t know whether I will keep it and I will make it through the 6 months of ownership but come along and see what it’s like to run a short range EV in
London let me quickly jump in and show you around as you can see on the instrument cluster we are at 73% now and the car is estimated ating 74 miles of range obviously that number is based on your previous driving history and will adjust based on your driving style
Conditions and so on and if you look at the main screen I’ve already been using the car a little bit and over the past 259 miles I’ve averaged 4 m per Kow so considering that it was a mixture of commuting high-speed Motorway driving and everything in between I would say
This pretty good especially considering the weather conditions but I can officially reset all of those values because one of the goals of this experim is to see how much it costs to run an EV compared to an equivalent petrol or diesel vehicle so far in November I’ve
Only had a single 15 Kow hour charge because I haven’t been using the car for commuting but I will really do it now just to see what it behaves like on shorter trips as well in terms of efficiency because some electric cars can take a massive hit for that also before I get
Accused the wheels have been already scuffed that’s not my job goes without saying that obviously at work I would have the opportunity to plug in into our hypervolt but I wouldn’t count this as public charging and not everybody has that option so just for the sake of the
Challenge I will not use the hyperbolt at all and purely rely just on the public charging infrastructure it’s the end of day four of this experiment wrapped up in the office the Comm took forever because there was lots of traffic going through the r High tunnel
But now I’m a couple of streets away from home the efficiency so far is not exactly the best at 3 m per Kow hour and I’m already down to 22% keeping mind I didn’t start at 100% so for my personal use case a week of commuting should be no problem on a full
Charge also ignore the warning about the charging flap that is a very common failure on these mini and some BMW products we will address it in further detail in a future video the mini will always give you this goodbye screen so now I can see that it’s set to charge
Immediately and that should be fine in this case because this is a ubit TriCity socket the charging process is pretty straightforward for these lower power chargers you bring your own public charging cable as you are only provided a socket on the charger end use your phone to scan the QR code which brings
You to the provider’s website where you can see the pricing details and so on you then just follow the steps on the screen plugg in the cable into the post itself and subsequently the car the payment is all done online using Apple pay so you don’t need to have your
Physical card on you and crucially you don’t need to create any type of an account in advance as long as you have Apple pay set up on your phone that’s it started charging and as you can see the car is reporting that it will be full just after midnight
It’s a lovely Friday morning aka work from home day so hopefully the traffing shouldn’t be too bad and I thought I would take this opportunity to show you actually my commute so we know what I’m working about it’s also quite fresh outside this is just condensation don’t
Worry but I will definitely have the air conditioning ging generally speaking this is how I’ve been set up for the past few days I just leave it on 20° in auto mode primarily use the heated seats to stay warm because I leave my jacket on anyways it’s a very short drive as
You can see uple maps thinks I will get to the office before 9:00 so that’s excellent let’s demist the wind screen I’ve also plugged in the OBD dongle into the diagnostic port so I will try using the my 3 app to connect to it as you can see obviously
Because the car was on charge overnight it’s at 100% but the important bit is the battery temperature the ambient temperature at the moment is 6° C and the battery is between 10 and 13 with an average of 11.5 we will see how that changes by the
Time I get to the office because it will be interesting to see whether the mini does any battery heating at these relatively low temperatures I’m already getting quite warm so I will drop it down into green mode I definitely do not need the full heating power I’m already
Com aable and you will see this is basically just crawling through traffic so whether you’re in Comfort sport or Eco it makes no difference to the Driving Experience whatsoever at least the sun is out that’s always a plus onto the a13 we go and you can immediately
Tell it’s a Friday because there’s much less traffic than usual yes this is considered good so far and it’s interesting because even though it’s cold and the batter is very full still at 99% I did get region to slow all the way down to zero without having to touch
The brake pedal at that very moment and it appears like the que for the r High tunnel is only2 miles long that is excellent by London standards especially considering they’re doing some Road works at the moment so yeah this should be one of the smoothest runs in work
I’ve had in a while and this is one of the perks of having a small car and I wanted a mini in the first place with the restrictors you can just fly through no problem the narrow rer High tunnel you will not get your mirror knocked off
Because the car is actually designed to be used in the city I know what a strange concept choosing the right car for the right job instead of a massive Range Rover which barely fits onto the road and we are on Routh Road right behind some chav with an exhaust on an
E46 before I forget let’s assess the stats so I now at 96% state of charge this is about usual I usually use about 5 to 7% to get here with the heating on and so on and importantly let’s look at the OBD data because the battery temperature is pretty much identical as
When we left off between 10 and 13° C batteries tend to be warmer than ambient temperature anyways because there’s always a little bit of a chemical reaction happening in there but obviously it was also charged during the entire night which does build up some heat but yeah that just proves it point
That for the mini specifically the batteries are not heated even at these cold temperatures even though there is a battery heater on board and there is obviously also a standard heat pump under the Bonnet and as you can see that’s drawing less than a kilowatt at
The moment to keep the cabin warm and that’s including the seed heating running the computers and so on so you don’t have to worry about losing masses of range if you’re just crawling through traffic and have the heating running I can calculate how much that works out to
In terms of time from a 100% to 0% charge at about 800 wats of power consumption if you want to learn more about heat pumps heating systems in E I would recommend checking out the video we made with two identical i3s one without and one with the heat pump I
Will leave that length in the top right hand corner it’s day 10 and it’s my day off so I decided to get out of London out of all the craz and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet in the nature specifically I came out to boxill it’s
About a 55 M drive from the aisle of dogs the red was quite mild in the last couple of days and I’ve been behaving myself instead of booting it off every single single Set of Lights I’ve been driving quite efficiently the overall efficiency improved to 3.2 m per Kow
Which meant that I had just below 7% when I set off from home I’m back from my hike now even after that 50ish mile drive the car is still at 21% and in fact because it was a long run the efficiency improved further to 3.5 m per Kow hour and I wasn’t driving
Particularly efficiently just following the speed limit and the flow of traffic so now it’s time for lunch and a charge Less Than 3 m away and I’m a local Tesla Supercharger love superchargers super easy to plug in always work plenty of availability and given I’m here at off
Peak times even without a Tesla membership I’m only paying 52 P per kilowatt hour which is amazing considering the reliability of superchargers and obviously the fact that it’s rapid charging and yes technically speaking I know I’m parked improperly because this charger should be allocated to this space but the mini
Has the charge port on the other side and these V3 superchargers have quite short cabl so I’m afraid this will have to do there is plenty of availability as I mentioned so I’m not really blocking anyone so yeah time for lunch I took my time bringing the mini basically to a
Full charge this meant that I had more than enough range for the next few days I got home fine and on Saturday I was back in the office and because we have free on street parking available during the weekends I found an available UB betric Lum post and use the usual
Process got the cable out of the boot scanned the QR code plugged in and used Apple pay to start the charge because the previous supercharge was so recent the car got from 46 to 100% before the peak pricing kicked in I didn’t do much driving over the weekend and we had the
Awards ceremony from car dealer Magazine on Monday which means that even though it’s a Thursday now the car is still just below 80% charge however the weather really cooled down and we are down to basically freezing just around 0° C so I thought this would be a good
Opportunity to check up on the battery again when I was leaving home the battery was at 2° C as expected just above the ambient temperature when I got to the office about half an hour later the temperature did rise a little bit to 2.74 De cus which again confirms that
Even at these very low temperatures the battery heater doesn’t kick in because the temperature was increased purely just by the battery being used to drive the car the cold be continued the following day on Friday and because the car was still at such high state of charge I treated myself to some
Preconditioning this is one of the benefits of an electric car where you can just press a button and the C heater kicks on while the car is locked without having to idle an engine just 5 minutes was enough to clear all the windows and bring the cabin up to temperature of
Course this used a couple of percent of the battery we had a really busy day in the office and I didn’t have time to get any lunch because I had a long journey ahead to Manchester I thought I would stop by a Ikea which is very close to my
House and charge the car while I’m having something to eat s this is the day when grit serve increased their rapid charging prices from 69 P to 79 P per Kow hour which is definitely now on the Steep end and you can find providers which provide electricity for a bit
Cheaper anyways paid for the convenience and got from 50 to 96% in 41 minutes while I was having my food taking an Urban electric vehicle with a relatively short range like the mini is on a long trip is definitely something where we pushing the boundaries but we have
Already discussed that and how to do it successfully but just for the record on the way up I had three stops first at BP PS at the Milton Kings coachway the ionity was full but there were plenty of available units at the BP site which doesn’t really matter with the mini
Because it can only accept a power of 50 Kow anyways used contactless payment to start the charge and got up to 61% in 14 minutes the second stop was not long after at rugby Services again contactless payment to start the charge but this time around because I was
Traveling with my friends we spent a bit longer here because this is where we actually had dinner the 39 minute charge took us from 25 to 96% and as you can see lots of kees and traveling with an electric car is definitely impossible at this point I’m still still quite far
Away from Manchester so we did a quick topup charge at Stafford Services Northbound I featured this site previously in the maxus e delivery 3 video so feel free to check that video out if you want to see how a commercial van handles a similar Journey but this
Time around instead of using the BP Chargers I went for the git surf as they are closer to the services at this point the conditions really are far from ideal it’s about -4° C heavy fog and as you can see on the front of the car there’s ice buildup starting to accumulate no
Problem for the minute though up to 85% in 20 minutes the time we used to top up on snacks and with this much charge I’ve plenty to get to the destination which is Angel Street I don’t have any off street parking so I find a local on
Street charger where I plug into the type two overnight just like previously contactless payment to start no need for any subscriptions or membership cards nothing like that anymore thanks to the small battery of the mini even though we are only charging at 11 KW AC it goes
From 32 to 100% in about 2 and 1/2 hours what’s impressive is that the following morning despite having done Motorway miles in very cold weather the G is predicting 111 M from a full battery in green mode with heating turned off but still I would say a quite impressive
Number considering the less than ideal battery specs on paper the Journey Back is even less eventful my friends wanted to do some shopping so we stopped off at the Stafford Center which has plenty of AC Chargers in the car park but I thought there is no need to block these
As I still have practically full battery the first stop was at the Chestnut Tree Pub which has ospray Chargers in the car park and this meant we had some actual proper meal for dinner instead of fast food second stop just like on the way up was at Milton King’s coachway at the B
People’s unit there were no ke throughout plugged in straight away no problems whatsoever with charging and I’m back home in London technically speaking it’s the day after my arrival from Manchester as I mentioned before I don’t want to dwell on this journey too much because we’ve already done many
Videos covering how to do long distances even in short range electric vehicles so I will leave those linked in the top right hand corner but the important bit is that I arrived with about 30% in the battery obviously without home charging you are not guaranteed a charging spot
At your destination so I had a plenty big buffer which meant that I was certain that I could make it to the office and back a couple more times knowing I would find some opportunity to squeeze in a charge at some point backed up the following day right at the
Lampost socket plugged in started charging no problems at all still had a comfortable buffer in the the car didn’t even give me a low range warning so at this point I think it’s getting a little bit repetitive so I will just keep on running the car as I’ve been doing so
Far using the lampost Chargers if anything interesting happens I will check in with you but stick around to the end where we will summarize and we will check out the numbers of how much all of this costs in the days to follow I’ve been using a mixture of slow
Charging at the lampost Chargers and Rapid charging but it’s day 32 and I managed to park up by a charger charger with still 50% in the battery they’re a bit different compared to the ubit TriCity post so just for the sake of completeness I thought I would show you
The process here as well you still bring your own cable scan the QR code and then you see the pricing information with the off peak being the cheapest I know of at 39 P per kilowatt hour with no plug-in fee and remember the goodbye screen from before with these Chargers you need to
Set up the charging time manually using set screen where you programm the car to only charge from Midnight to 7:00 a.m. on the cheap electricity with the rest you continue on your phone just like before you press start then Apple pay plug in the cable into the Lum post and
That’s it because of the off peak setting the vehicle will first try out to charge for a minute or two this just tests how fast the charger is and then puts the charging on hold because it calculates to charge the bulk of the electricity during the cheap period but
It will still prioritize to have a full battery by your set departure time just as I’m leaving I can see that everything is working as expected in the instrument cluster where the charging is on hold and just like expected the following warning the car is at 100
% it’s the 18th of December and I just pulled into our office car park and because of the reent charg I still have about 85% in the battery it’s my last day at work for the year Arthur was nice enough to let me off a little bit early
So I can spend a lot of time with my family back home in Slovakia but this presents the Fantastic opportunity to test out how much charge the car will lose over the two weeks I’m abroad so once again for the record 85% in the high voltage battery I’m turning the vehicle
Off officially locked and I will be back in a few weeks time it’s the 4th of January I’m back by the car it’s pouring heavily outside so I’m glad that I have the car to go home and let’s see unlock that worked on first try no
Problem problem and if I jump in and start it 85% still in the battery if I remember correctly that’s exactly what it was 2 weeks ago when I left the car so no drama and back to the regular schedule here is something you don’t get with a petrol car I am visiting my
Sister at the University of Essex in Colchester it’s the weekend so I’ve got free parking and on top of that free unlimited charging as well plenty of charging points available all type two you don’t need any Authentication you just plug in and they start charging and obviously some people have very good
Taste here I’ve been using the car for the next few days on the leftover charge the temperatures went up so it’s really really efficient but I’m now down to 177% and it’s my lunch break so let me show you how quick and easy it is to top
Up the car I’ve arrived at the local McDonald’s literally a 5minute drive about a mile and they have two inst Droid Chargers in the car park so let’s get going plug in and it’s going one of the nice thing about the mini is that normally with electric cars the warmer
The battery the faster it can charge but even though the battery didn’t really have much time to warm up it’s quite mild outside but I haven’t been driving at all you can see that the power output is really Rising quite rapidly and in case it wasn’t obvious up until now you
Don’t have to stay with the car so I will simply lock it and go inside to order TC plans acquired exactly 10 minutes later and if you look at the charging screen I’m basically already up to a third of the battery a quick top up will
Get you 20 30 mil back and you can get on the road again stop the session plus obviously keep in mind if I was actually sitting in instead of eating in the office the car would have been 80 90% full by the time I was done we are into
March now the weather has improved so the experiment was really starting to get quite repetitive so let’s actually go through the numbers I’ve got those on my iPad I’ve covered a about 2,000 M since we started recording this video important to mention when I collected
The car it was at 73% state of charge it’s now at 76% state of charge so no cheating I returned it just like I picked it up the overall efficiency during those 2,000 mil has been 3.7 m per Kow hour according to the trip computer if you do the numbers based on
The fact that I use 610 Kow hours to cover that mileage it works out to 3.3 m per Kow hours so why that discrep it has to do with the fact that the trip computer only calculates your energy use while the car is being driven just like
You would have in a petrol or diesel vehicle but because I was using some of the luxuries of electric cars like the cabin preconditioning that uses power while the car is locked so that’s the reason why the calculated energy consumption is a little bit higher likewise there are some charging losses
Along the way and so on most importantly the question which everybody asks is cost and to recharge those 610 KW hours when I added up the total it cost me exactly 363 lb which works out to about 59 p per kilowatt hour on average which is definitely quite a bit higher than what
You can achieve if you charge at home and definitely much higher if you can charge at home overnight but this is the reality of public charging all of these numbers are a little bit ambiguous so what does it work out to in terms of a petrol engined vehicle equivalent it is
37 m per gallon which is literally the UK average for a petrol vehicle and that doesn’t sound very impressive in a YB with all of this charging stuff when you don’t get much of a cost saving well it’s a little bit complicated because beyond the costs there are some benefits
As I mentioned of running an electric car you’ve got the luxuries of being able to preheat the cabin it’s a very smooth drive much smoother than any automatic especially in this price range it is healthier for the car because especially if you’re doing lots of short Journeys the engine doesn’t need to warm
Up battery doesn’t mind that it’s cold as we discussed in the previous sections of this video important to point out is that I have not been cheating at all and that average figure also includes the trip to Manchester so if I only use the car around town for commuting for the
Occasional longer trip to the shops for a hike Etc then I could easily get by with just purely AC charging and even if we account for the charging at the same 3.7 m per Kow efficiency it would work out to 50 m per gallon equivalent and that’s where the
Difference starts to grow because obviously petrol and diesel cars are very inefficient for short Journeys and as I mentioned it’s not very healthy for them whereas these electric cars can still be quite decent and keep in mind this is the worst case scenario in Winter where the car always needs to
Warm up because I was using the full comfort of the vehicle with the heating running not worrying about range driving like I would in any other type of car also to put the record straight on some of the myths I didn’t need to Cee for a
Charge once I didn’t run out of charge once I didn’t need a million apps on my phone to figure out how the charging situation works there are two apps which I basically used zap map for finding Chargers and Tesla for the few supercharging sessions I have done as Tesla still doesn’t have contactless
Payments on all of their stations but they are going to be adding those going forward for all the other charging Apple pay or contactless payment works just fine so no additional hustle there either obviously I will not sugar cat this this is not an ideal situation if
You especially do a lot of driving and you cannot charge at home there is no way we would recommend this as the vehicle for you and I know you may say Obviously we are an electric car business we sell used electric cars but trust us there have been many scenarios
Where we had customers approach us that they want to buy a vehicle but it was definitely unsuitable for their needs for example their commute was very long and they didn’t have guaranteed charging at home we actually did not take deposits on those cars and we did not
Sell those cars because it’s just going to lead to a bad experience so that leads us to what I would do if I were in your position if you want to go electric and you can’t charge at home because if for example like the tax benefits you
Want to do the right thing for the environment Etc there are many reasons why people choose to go electric unless you absolutely kind of love the many and you love the character the gadgets and so on what we would recommend especially if you’re new to EVS is
Something like the Hyundai Kona yes it’s possibly a little bit more boring but it’s in the same price range as the mini but most importantly it features a much bigger battery pack yet it’s still a very efficient car you will easily get 3 4 5 m per kilowatt hour when the weather
Is nice and that translates to a range of over 200 miles in the winter and we have seen customers touch the 300 mark when the weather is nice and when you drive gently which means that for most londoners even if you can’t charge at home you will basically have to plug
This in once every week two weeks even if you have a longish commute so that’s where I would leave it this is definitely the more suitable option the mini is for the hardcore EV fans if you really are a fan of the mini brand or if
You have charging at home or if it’s your second vehicle in the household then it’s absolutely no problem at all but what I’m trying to say is that it definitely is possible to make an e work for you even if you do not have off Street charging and keep in mind the
Situation will only keep getting better and better there is a lot more Chargers being installed throughout all the areas of London and importantly electricity prices are on their way down so we are in mid-march at the moment 1 of April is the first cap reduction so hopefully that will translate to lower public
Charging figures as well even though public charging is not necessarily affected by these cups and then at the the end of summer there is supposed to be another electricity reduction so again the electric car market will probably get a little bit hotter still I think that’s where I will leave it I’m
Sure you have lots of questions so make sure to leave those in the comments if you’re in the market for an EV and you found this video helpful make sure to get in touch with us because we do have plenty of stock available across all different price points and different
Ranges so we can always advise which one would be the most suitable one for you based on what’s available hit the like button if you appreciate the effort put into this video because it was basically four months of filming and we try to condense it all into about a 30 minute
Video and last but not least if you want to see more EV content and learn about EVS if you’re still undecided make sure to subscribe to the channel and if you want to see the latest video about how to do long distances with a proper long
Range electric car make sure to check it out here thank you again see you in the next one
Running a short-range, slow-charging electric car without home or workplace charging in the middle of winter in London?
Spoiler alert – it is possible with this F56-generation MINI Electric (also known as the Cooper SE in some markets). But at what cost? And does it impact the convenience of having a car in the first place? We answer all of your burning questions in this video!
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
00:51 Vehicle Setup
02:14 Ubitricity
03:30 Martin’s Commute
07:39 Tesla Supercharger by Box Hill
09:15 Ubitricity in Bermondsey
09:44 Cold Weather & Cabin Pre-Conditioning
10:43 Manchester Trip
14:47 Chargy
16:03 Stationary Discharge over the Holidays
17:13 Free Charging
17:34 Rapid Topup at Instavolt
18:47 Conclusion
