Driving Update

Been driving #304 for over 3 weeks now, and enjoy it very much. Last weekend we put a bicycle rack on the back and went out to Allamuchy Mountain for some mountain biking. The bike rack worked well even though this was the first time I'd used it with a hatch back, didnt see a big drop in the range, even with two people in the car and the bikes creating a lot of wind drag. #304 did great getting nice and dirty with the big boys on a little dirt road with 2 feet deep pot holes. Would of been a perfect trip if I hadnt taken a bad fall on the trail, I'm fine now, but was limping for a couple days.
This morning I had a problem where #304 wouldnt start up, I pressed the start button and the lights all went through the normal pattern, but the charge guage didnt move, could put it in gear and the D came on for drive, but it wouldnt go. Had to hit the start/stop button a few times and eventually got it to work, but it was quite strange.
Got my first bill from MINI for $850, BMW/MINI has offered to waive this first months payment and has told us to ignore this bill as the credit will show up in our next bill.
I also got an email that my wall charging cable will be in next week, so hopefully I'll have a working wall charger soon, this will mean less rest days for #304 and a lot more driving, I seem to be suffering from perpetual charging anxiety this is like range anxiety, only I'm not driving as fast or as far as I can because I know it will take a day to recharge the batteries.

Assignment 01

MINI sent out our first homework assignment, well if only school had been this easy. They've setup a web site for those in the field trial on which they will be asking us to fill out a journal, and upcoming survey's. Our first assignment was fairly simple, just needed to sign in and make a journal entry. From the picture above you can see some of the upcoming assignments, Subconscious Symbol Identification sounds foreboding, hope a psychiatrist doesnt see my answers, Im not sure I like the idea of BMW getting a peck at my subconscious. :)

Also got a notice that the wall charging cables are shipping to both coasts, so Ill probably have a working wall charger soon. Ill be glade to charge up quickly, but was sort of hoping for a second month with the lease payment waived.

2 Weeks with #304

Well its been a very short 2 weeks with MINI E #304 we've racked up 642 miles together and although charging with the 120v cable can be a pain I'm really enjoying this car, just would like people to realize this is an electric car.

Last weekend I went to my fiancee's house again, there have been a number of biking events in the Philadelphia area lately and we have to goto those. The drive was uneventful, but I wanted to charge the MINI E at her house without having to move the cars all around, so I tried using an extension cord, after about 4 hours charging I noticed a burning smell coming from the outlet, I quickly unplugged things the smell seemed to be coming more from the plug end of the extension cord then anything. The next day we switched the cars arround blocking my MINI E in for the weekend, and charged from the same outlet without an extension cable, without a problem, this is the same outlet we'd used the week before. I was a bit surprised about this as it was a brand new 12 guage 25' extension cord rated for 120v 15A the best that I'm aware of, I guess we just arnt going to be able to drive the MINI E at her house as changing cars arround every time we need to use it is a pain.

Here are some figures for all you math nuts who want to know exactly what the range numbers I've been seeing are. You'll notice a number of the shorter rides have some very low or high numbers, I tend to discount these shorter drives as not giving a true estimate. While the overall Average Range is 103 miles, if we droped all drives less then 40 miles we get an Average Range of 108 miles on a full charge, or at least until the gauge says 0%, the car is suppose to drive beyond that at a reduced rate, but I havent tested it

Date	Miles driven	Starting charge	Ending Charge	% charge per mile	Range Estimate	Starting Miles to go	Ending Miles to go	Starting odm	Ending odm
8-Jun	17.4	100%	85%	0.86%	116		83	35		home from Dealer
8-Jun	21.1	88%	66%	1.04%	96		64			to mall
9-Jun	59.2	95%	40%	0.93%	108	93	41			work and erands
10-Jun		47%	26%				27	133		to dealer
10-Jun	27.3	100%	74%	0.95%	105	108	82			home from dealer
11-Jun	36.7	99%	66%	0.90%	111		74		214	to work
12-Jun	77.6	100%	31%	0.89%	112	114	36		292	to Fiancee's drove conservitively
13-Jun	5.3	87%	79%	1.51%	66
15-Jun	76.5	100%	29%	0.93%	108	108	27	301	378	Home from Fiancee's
16-Jun	47.8	100%	55%	0.94%	106	100	58
17-Jun	58.8	100%	43%	0.97%	103	108	45
18-Jun	34.2	79%	41%	1.11%	90	84	42		519
19-Jun	77.7	100%	27%	0.94%	106			523		to Fiancee's
22-Jun	76.5	100%	31%	0.90%	111	103	32	601	677	Home from Fiancee's

Trip to Philly

This weekend I drove #304 to my fiancee's house outside of Philly. I had previously measured the distance as 80 miles and was a bit nervous about my first long trip in my MINI E. I let the car charge upto 100% on Friday, while I drove my gas car to work. For the trip there I drove very conservatively staying at the speed limit and accelerating slowly, there is about 30 miles of highway driving with a 65mph speed limit, and I really saw a big differance in my charge usage during that time compared to the rest of my drive. I arrived having driven 77.6 miles with 31% charge left and 36 miles of range left.
I had to back the car into the driveway and plug the charger in through a window to get a charge, I can see why the EV1 had the charger plug in the front it would be a much more convenient location. I also put a towel over the wheel charger light, as it was a bit too noticeable otherwise. We used #304 a little bit over the weekend for short trips around the suburbs of philly, then I drove it back on Monday morning.
For the drive back I decided I could drive normally and get home safely. I left with a 100% charge and drove the same speed as most of the traffic about 75mph on the highway, and not exactly the speed limit on other streets. I arrived having driven 76.5 miles (not sure how I lost a mile) with 29% charge and 27 miles left to go.
I didnt have enough charge to make it into work so #304 got a rest day to charge up today.
I've had my MINI E for a week now, and have put 343 miles on it, would be more but without a fast charger, I'm having to give it rest days.

0 rpm acceleration limited

One of the great things about electric cars is they have instant torque that means that when you press the accelerator you get a the full power of the motor immediately, think of it as having a car that is always at red line in the power curve, but without that hi pitched engine noise.
Normally when I'm driving the MINI E if I punch the accelerator, I immediately get a very quick burst of acceleration and have to hold onto the steering wheel as torque steer pulls the car heavily to the left. But at a stop, when I press on the accelerator, there is a noticeable half second delay before I get even the smallest amount of acceleration, and even then the acceleration isnt anything to write home about. Then once I get moving, maybe at 3mph or so, the full acceleration kicks in and I have to pull my foot back on the accelerator. This is a very fustrating experiance, for the MINI E's they removed the normal button that would allow you to disable traction control, and if it was the traction control system kicking in to keep the the tires from spinning I'd understand. But its not, this is the control software overly limiting your acceleration at low RPMs.
In a previous article on greencarreports.com John Voelcker mentioned this problem, it was also mentioned that the car may have been running an older version of the software. I hadnt noticed this problem in my pervious test drive, and since these cars have been sitting in storage for the last 6 months, I'm guessing they all have an older version of the software. I asked my service Rep, at Morristown MINI about getting the latest software and he said he'd look into it.
Hopefully this is just overly conservitive software and we can have a car thats as quick off the line as it is once moving.

looks like need to avoid GFI

Yesterday after having the car and charger checked out by the dealer, and both getting a clean bill of health, I got a full charge at from their 60A charger. The MINI service reps Michael and Fred from Morristown MINI were very helpful even though this was the first MINI E they'd had to diagnose a problem for, as it turned out the backline BMW tech they contact for MINI E problems was already aware of the problem, having read my blog post about it, to All MINI/BMW employee's reading this thank you for your help and supporting a great program, its good to know your reading this.

Anyway, I returned home and tried to charge the car again, but when I plugged the car into the garage outlet the MINI E's charge light only came on for a second before going out while the charger's charge light came on and stayed on. The MINI service reps had suggested I try plugging into other outlets, but also had said I should not use a extension cable as it might overheat, I have a 12 gauge extension cable rated at 120V 15A which I very much doubt will overheat. but I wanted to try what I could do without it. I found that if I pulled the car out and backed it into my garage, I could just barely reach a outlet in the kitchen without an extension cable, I plugged it in and.. POP the kitchen GFI triped. Then I started looking for somewhere else to plug in and noticed the laundry and dryer, The single outlet for both of these was not on a GFI, was the only outlet on that curcuit and had a 20A breaker rather then the regular 15A ones on most of my curcuits. So I plugged it in there, and it worked, was able to charge the car completely overnight, though its still very slow about 3% charge in one hour, at that rate we're looking at 33 hours to charge the car from 0% to 100%.
So it looks like we need to aviod GFIs though it did charge for me the first night on a GFI curcuit, this could be a big problem as most modern Garages and outdoor plugs have to be GFIs. The problem could also be the wiring, I got a wire tester and checked the outlets but it said they were all good, I'm going to try replacing one of the GFI's temporally with a normal outlet to verify whether its the GFI or the wiring, causing the charging to fail. In the mean time I guess no laundry is getting done while charging :)

Dirty Power or Grounding Fault

I've had a frustrating evening trying to charge my MINI E using the 120V 15A charger, after spending a great day Driving it and returning with only a 40% charge. At first it seemed to be charging fine but when I checked on it the charging light on the MINI E was out. I replugged things in and left it to charge, only to come back later and the Charger was showing a blinking charging fault, this indicates an EV ground fault trip, but I checked the MINI E and saw no error messages on the computer, I double checked that the Amperage setting was 12A and it was. So I tried again, later I had the same problem, tried again come back to no lights on the charger, a bit of searching revealed its on a GFI circuit and the GFI had triped, so reset and tried again then came back and the Power fault light was on solid on the Charger, indicating no Ground on the wall socket...
you get the idea I maybe a bit off in the order of some of those errors, about this point I couldnt even get get the the MINI E charger light to come on for mor then a minute. During this time I started to notice that lights all through my house were flickering every now and then, at first I thought the MINI E's charging problems were causing this, but after I gave up on charging the MINI E still only at 47% charged, I noticed the flickering didnt go away.
So tomarrow going to call and see what the experts say, I have a few possible Ideas.
1. Im getting very dirty power from the power company, and thats causing all these problems, if so I just need to wait and try later when the power company has fixed the problem.
2. There is a grounding fault in the MINI or the charging plug, looking at the charging plug that connects to the MINI E, carefully I saw a number of contact points that were not symetric, and could easily be a point of poor contact, going to have to speak to the experts on this.
3. the cuircuit I'm plugging into is not properly grounded, I tend to doubt this as this is a GFI cuircuit that goes to my main bathroom, and I had this checked out when I bought the house, but maybe I shouldnt be charging through a GFI cuircut, I'm going to have to have this tested.
Will know more tomorrow.

[addendum]
Took the MINI E and charger into the dealer, but they both worked fine there, I hope it was just a temporary problem with dirty power.