From June 2009 to June 2010 I had the privilege of Driving an All Electric MIMI E for a year, it was a great experience, and got me hooked on electric cars. I've since moved on to other electric cars which I will blog about.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

#304 back from service

I got MINI E #304 back from the service department on Friday after 2 days, They did a lot of work on it. Foremost of which was replacing the PCU thats the gold footlocker under the hood which is the brains of the MINI E, I know a number of people have had this replaced numerous times but this was the first time for #304. It sounds like if a MINI E has any problems at all the first thing they do is replace the PCU.
They also preformed the second scheduled maintenance, I'm at 7000 miles a little short of the 8000 mile point but it was over 3 months since the last scheduled maintenance.
The Tires were replaced with snow tires for the Winter, MINI is covering this for all MINI E drivers in NY NJ and will be storing our summer tires to put back on in the spring. They also put the Side decal on my MINI E, this the words MINI and the E plug symbol, I've been asking for this for six months, hopefully more people will recognize that its electric now.
I had also asked them to test the heater, as the heat output seems very low to me, but they couldnt find anything wrong with it.

Anyway its been running great since the service, but my range is down to 80 miles, due to running the heater all the the time, the batteries being cold in the morning, and I think the Winter Tires reduce my mileage too.

Had a little trouble this morning, I'd forgotten to plug it in the night before, this is only the second time I've forgotten to do this but its an annoying mistake. I was reading about the Chevy Volt and how they are going to have an iphone app to communicate with the car, it would be great if it could tell you at night, "hay you forgot to plug me in".

2 comments:

  1. You have to turn up the fan or that "Positive Temperature Coefficient" heating element will stop generating heat to protect itself. It takes a long time to cool off and reset, it seems to me. I often turn the fan up to 3 in the cold if I have the range.

    This is very different than conventional hot water heaters that are hottest on the lowest fan setting.

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  2. Does/can your Mini-E heat itself up when plugged into the mains?

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