Several weeks back we brought you a link about a company that was creating a fully electric MINI. The concept includes four electric motors (one per wheel) with a combined horsepower of 640. This information has circulated quietly on the web for over a month now with little notice outside the MINI community. Until today when a Treehugger.com story was posted on Digg. So with all this recent publicity we thought we’d re-post a link to the information for those that missed it the first time around.
[ The Hybrid MINI ] Treehugger.com
If you go to the actual home page for this thing, I love the disclaimer at the end. I suppose a mod of this magnitude would void the warrantee. 😉
Finally, an electric car I can really appreciate!
Very cool! Could this be the future of hot rodding? BTW, no mechanical brakes also means no parking brake. Notice the wheel chocks in the photo. 🙂
Fascinating read…cool technology…glad they chose a MINI.
Bring on the Tesla! I would think they’d get a higher top end with 640 HP, tho. Acceleration must be brutal. I like the range on it – real-world useful.
Wow! I wonder how it would perform on a track?
SWEET!! I wonder what the braking performance is like…
That is so cool. I hope BMW/Mini is watching this. I have been wanting this car since I heard they put an electric in the “Italian Job” minis for the subway scenes. If only we could get this car from the manufacturer instead of a $200,000 kit upgrade. While I’m dreaming, I hope they’d include a plug for home charging the battery/capacitors.
I would be interested in how much the wheels cost. I imagine this would be a bit easier than the current process of converting a vehicle to an electric. It looks like the company sells all the brain box to run the system also. Think of a Mini with these things strapped on it. That would be fun!
I agree that a parking break would be a must though. I am sure that if they can get 640 hp they can think up some way to put a parking brake on the thing.
This is an interesting demonstration, but almost as interesting as what they tell you is what they don’t tell you.
To generate 640 hp, you need to provide 477.4 kilowatts of electrical power. That’s a lot of batteries. It’s likely the full power mode can only be used for a few seconds.
They mention the total weight of the wheel motors is half the weight of the original engine they took out. They don’t mention that this is a lot of added unsprung weight and they don’t say how much the smaller engine/generator and batteries add. This MINI likely weighs a lot more than the original MINI and handles like a pig because of adding 50 lbs or so of unsprung weight to each wheel.
The engine generator is in the rear, taking up what little cargo space the MINI has to begin with.
This isn’t really a hybrid, either. It is an electric car with an onboard generator. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not a hybrid in the sense the term is used for existing hybrid vehicles.
I’m not trying to diminish the importance of this as a technology demonstration, but it is a long way from being any more than that.
This is a wonderful indication of future possibilities. The concept of using a burst of high power, available only for a few seconds (when accelerating) makes a lot of sense. Obviously there will have to be tradeoffs between battery weight, unsprung weight, time to recharge after a jackrabbit start before the next burst of power, and so forth, depending on what sort of performance is desired. As CarlNut implies, it may be hard to get Mini-quality handling too. But the potential is exciting.
The whole thing looks like bs to me. And Dan from Dan’s data. Besides that his reading of the specs don’t equal out the results of the press release, does anyone really want to drive a car w/o breaks?
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