Test driving the Mitsubishi i electric car

On Monday I was handed the keys to a Mitsubishi i electric vehicle to try out for the day. This four-passenger vehicle is not a plug-in hybrid, but a true electric car. The price is very attractive: it starts at $21,625 after a federal tax credit of $7,500.

I drove the Mitsubishi i in the hills, in city streets, and on the freeway. It had no problem accelerating up to 70 miles an hour (it has a rated top speed of 80 miles an hour, but I didn't want to get a speeding ticket). I tried it out in the three driving modes it offers: standard, economy, and regenerative braking mode. Standard, as you might expect, is the zippiest. Economy mode is slightly anemic, but not as sluggish as I thought it might be. I did not like the regenerative braking mode, because as soon as I lifted my foot from the pedal, the brakes would kick in and the car would slow down in a way that would certainly end up making me and my passengers feel sick after a while. (The regenerative braking happens in the other 2 modes as well, but the effect is more subtle.)

Even though the seating and interior was of the no-frills variety, the car came with a nice audio and navigation system, with Bluetooth and iPod connectivity. Hurray for cheap electronics that make driving more fun!

When I picked up the car, the mileage indicator said the range was 91 miles (the rated range is 62 miles/charge). As soon as I started driving it I noticed that the miles were dropping faster than the distance I was traveling. By switching it to economy mode, the mileage indicator seem to be more accurate.

I took the car home, and parked in the garage. I topped off the batteries by plugging it into a 120 V AC outlet. After a couple of hours, the mileage indicator increased about 12 miles. It turns out that there are three ways to charge the Mitsubishi i, and the 120 V standard outlet is by far the slowest -- it takes 22.5 hours to fully charge it. The optional home charging dock (which uses 240V) will charge the car in 7 hours. If you are lucky enough to have public quick-charge ports in your area, you can use one to charge the car to 80% capacity in 30 minutes. Mitsubishi claims that "thousands of public quick-chargers are currently under development across the nation," but "under development" is a mighty loose term. (Here's a list of electric vehicle charging stations currently in operation.) If there were already a widely distributed network of quick public chargers, I would buy one of these cars without hesitation.

It's rated at 112 MPGe (from the literature: "the energy present in one gallon of gasoline -- if you converted that gallon into electricity -- can send the Mitsubishi i a whopping 112 miles.")

Here's some info about the motor and batteries, cribbed straight from the press release:

Powered by Mitsubishi innovative Electric Vehicle (MiEV) technology, the rear-wheel drive vehicle’s drive system includes a 49 kW (66 bhp) AC synchronous electric motor; an 88 cell, 330V lithium-ion battery pack for a peak storage of 16 kWh; and a single fixed-reduction gear transmission. This electric motor is capable of producing its peak torque of 145 lb.-ft. almost instantaneously when accelerating from a standstill; the vehicle has a top speed of approximately 80 mph.

The back seats are roomy enough for adults, but with four people in the car, there's not a lot of room for groceries. If you don't have backseat passengers, the seats fold down, providing plenty of room.

The most striking thing about the Mitsubishi i is that it behaves pretty much like a standard gasoline powered car. I was anticipating having a futuristic experience driving it around, but instead it felt pretty much like a standard issue econobox. I realized that's exactly how an electric car should feel -- like a car everyone is already comfortable driving. I would be perfectly happy driving one, and am thinking about buying one when they become available in the coming months, despite the fact that there's not a lot of public charging stations around.

I know that there is a trade-off between using gasoline and using toxic batteries, but after testing the Mitsubishi i, I think the future of cars is going to be fully electric.

Find out more about the Mitsubishi i

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Scott Croom

I love the idea of having a plug in car but being an apartment dweller kinda kills that thought.
- eviladrian
  
  This is a big deal, like most folks who live within ten miles of a city centre I’m in an apartment with no enclosed garage. I have a reserved parking space but there is no power socket that I could use.
  
  I do most of my “driving” on a scooter with a 2.5 gallon tank and fill it maybe every fortnight, so the range of an electric vehicle wouldn’t be a problem for me if I could just have somewhere to charge it at night.
  
  I’m expecting to see some enterprising power company figure out how to put individual, lockable charge points into apartment blocks, with the vehicle ID somehow linked to your home bill.
  - jackie31337
    
    We have those at my apartment building and at most apartment buildings in Finland. There’s a little power pole between every two parking spaces. The current use case is for plugging in your engine block heater in the winter, but it wouldn’t be difficult to covert them for charging electric vehicles.
  - Brainspore
    
    I’m expecting to see some enterprising power company figure out how to put individual, lockable charge points into apartment blocks, with the vehicle ID somehow linked to your home bill.
    
    It’s actually been figured out already, there are a number of competing companies working to build electric vehicle charging networks around the world. A lot of them also plan on building “battery swap” stations for people who need a full charge in a hurry. (In that business model you would own the car but lease the batteries.)
beemoh

“The optional home charging dock (which uses 240V) will charge the car in 7 hours.”

Looks like they need to release them in England, then. A charging time of “overnight” probably makes that very feasible for a lot of lighter users.
- Richard Dagenais
  
  North American homes are serviced with 240V. Its only split down to 120V at the wall socket. Your stove, dryer, baseboard heaters are all 240V.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    North American homes are serviced with 240V. Its only split down to 120V at the wall socket. Your stove, dryer, baseboard heaters are all 240V.
    
    Well, sorta. My stove and dryer are gas, and use 120VAC. But essentially you’re right, in that 240V does make it to my house, but the only 240V circuits I have are in the garage. Convenient enough for me, as it’s exactly where I’d want to plug in my car. Other people with natural gas heating elements might require an electrician to wire up a 240V outlet for this purpose.
- MoJo Chan
  
  The car is available in the UK, priced at about £26k with a government funded discount. Overnight charging is standard of course.
  
  I’d love to get one of these, not least to save money on the commute to work, but the price tag of double what the car costs in the US puts me off. The $20k figure is only a little more than you would pay for a small petrol car from Mitsubishi such as my current Colt Cleartek.
- digi_owl
  
  Hell, most of the world use something around 240 as their wall socket voltage. As such it is more a question of amperage of the fuse involved in the circuit.
irksome

It has a “bulb” setting?
- Alpacaman
  
  Bulb is for for driving at night or in other low light conditions, but you need to tie a tripod to the front of the car for it to work well.
Massive Missive

Any chance Nissan could let you borrow a Leaf for comparison purposes? I would love to know your thoughts on how it compares to this car. It sounds not at all dissimilar.
Surly Driver

You’d generally only shift into B if you were driving downhill for extended periods of time.

If you were using that “gear” while driving in the flats, I can understand your passengers getting queasy. : )
Chris LeBeouf

Toxic batteries AND a reliance on a centralized electric grid that might be powered by a coal plant. Also, the fact that the price is artificially low because of subsidizing really turns me off. We need truly affordable electric transportation. Prices that could shift violently with any given election isn’t a good thing.
- eviladrian
  
  So put solar panels on your roof!
- crnk
  
  What is your position here? That we shouldn’t try to make progress in this arena because it isn’t fast enough?
  I want affordable electric transportation too, but right now this is what the technology allows. Look at the history of flight: a series of trials and failures over many years that we’re still improving on today. Micro-size that to the history of electric cars: we’ve had a few historical trials and (commerical) failures and this seems to be the proof of concept on feasibility that we’re seeing in this post. Over time we’ll see improvements in each of the required technologies for both performance and cost.
- Mona n Tony Skvarenina
  
  Somewhere I read that even though its charged from the grid, its overall carbon footprint (IE all EV’s) is substantially lower than a gas car….Toxic batteries? Thats a wash with all the toxic crap associated with a gas power car. Oil sludges….trans sludges etc….
  The Leaf had none of that…. The point about the price is right though…
Angryjim

I’ve ridden in a couple cabs where it felt like the driver was braking every time they let up on the gas, jostling the car and making me a bit carsick. I thought they were just bad drivers, but now I wonder if I was in a hybrid car with the described regenerative braking feature.
comfortstarr

Rear-wheel drive is a problem for those of us in el norte. But this looks very cool and promising.
- Walter Dexter
  
  Depending on the weight distribution, rear wheel drive may be fine.
  
  In my experience having driven both FWD and RWD in snow, RWD isn’t worse, it’s just different. You can’t drive them the same in snow.
- David Hall
  
  Rear-wheel drive is NOT a problem for those of us in el norte. Vehicle weight distributions which are biased over the non-drive wheels are a problem.
  
  This car’s entire drive train is over the drive wheels. It should have just as much bad-weather traction as a typical front-wheel drive car w/o the native predisposition for oversteer. And considering the rather square wheel layout unless the batteries are also over the rear wheels (I haven’t looked up the numbers) I suspect it will have quite close to perfect balance when two adults are in the front seats.
http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson

Hopefully, States with safety inspections will update their requirements to include electric cars. In PA, there is a mandatory requirement for the car to pass a gas filler tube pressurization test. No gas tank, not gonna pass the test, not going to pass inspection. Yay for PA!
- cegev
  
  A few quick Google searches seem to suggest that this is completely untrue: PA appears to have different inspection requirements for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles, and also appears to have some sort of specific inspection fee waiver for electric vehicles as well.
http://twitter.com/ezwages Richard Wages

I agree, I have thought for a long time electric cars should be the future.
Electric cars have been around for more than 75 years…its about time.
bardfinn

If it gets 112 MPGe, and “MPGe” is defined as “the total amount of energy* in a gallon of gasoline”, then because ICE are between 18%-20% average efficiency over a work cycle (start, warmup, speed up, slow down, run steady, shutdown) , then if we want to compare this electric vehicle’s energy efficiency to a gasoline-fueled ICE, we can only consider 20% of the energy available in that gallon of gasoline.

This makes the fuel efficiency, measured on the same MPG base as ICEs, approximately 22 MPG, for the purposes of comparing the efficiency to ICE fairly.

However, the electricity being generated to run these cars is almost certainly not produced in a system with the efficiency of 18-20% fuel-to-work efficiency – coal plants run at ~33% thermal efficiency, and gas-and-coal plants ~50% thermal efficiency.

So this puts the MPG ‘rating’ of the car, for the purposes of comparing fuel efficiency to an ICE, somewhere between 36 – 60 MPG, depending on the electric generating source. This doesn’t count nuclear, geothermal, solar, or wind energy sources, which have different methods of measuring efficiency.

*hydrocarbon-captured energy, not atomic energy (E).
- Richard Dagenais
  
  Are you counting the energy lost to transmission?
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_UKSXQTK3FZOHNQ6ENX2LPVXRHA ClayE
  
  MPGe and ICE MPG efficiency is a much more complicated calculation that what you allude to.
  
  Iterations of it have been making the rounds through the discussion groups for some time.
  
  One thing I would like to point out is that it takes ~7.0kWh of electricity to refine a gallon of petrol gas. (I can cite many sources; here is a picture from a Nissan Leaf Booth stating 7.5kWh/gallon, http://evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm)
  
  A fairly inefficient EV uses 300Wh/mi.
  
  That means an EV can go ~23miles with just the electricity it takes to make the gas.
Karloskar

The i, or i-MiEv as it’s called here in Australia, would be a great car for me but the pricing here is outrageous. They want about AU$53,000 for it, while a petrol powered Lancer (bigger, faster, more features, safer) can be picked up new for about AU$23,000. There are many things you can do for $30,000 that will be better for the environment than pulling one petrol engine off the road…
bardfinn

I’m also ignoring transmission losses from hysteresis loss (resistance causing electricity to turn to heat, inductive coupling, etc.) because that variable varies widely and depends on infrastructure, distance, and transmission method (AC/DC, AC phase number and frequency, voltage, amperage). Someone else who is familiar with the figures for efficiency loss from power transmission can address those figures, being sure to count the diesel fuel used by petrol delivery trucks.
- Andrew Kane
  
  US EPA has already taken some of these variables into account in the way that MPGe is measured. It ignores production efficiencies; it is a “tank to wheels” measurement, not a “well to wheels” measurement. Such a measurement can be accomplished by first measuring the car’s dynamic efficiency in Watt-hours(Wh)/km and then dividing by the number of Wh in a liter of gasoline. The results are averaged from many different driving cycles and many examples of the same car model.
- David Hall
  
  You can safely ignore the diesel fuel used by petrol delivery trucks in your back-of-the-envelope calculations as it is an order of magnitude below the error level of your estimates.
  
  In the USA a big-rig gets ~8 MPG hauling at max load (80,000 lbs).
  A petrol tanker truck holds 6,000 gallons
  The average delivery distance is well below 100 miles from pipeline terminal to station.
  100/8 = 12.5 gallons of fuel to deliver a load of petrol = 0.2%.
Finnagain

Too lazy to look it up: What is the life-span and replacement cost of the batteries? Rear wheel drive is a surprise. Yay oversteer goodness!
- Andrew Kane
  
  The “stock answer” of battery vendors is that Li-Ion batteries last “about ten years”. In practice the answer is a bit more complicated. Lithium ion batteries degrade over time regardless of usage, losing on the order of 20% remaining capacity per year. So, after ten years you have a battery with very little remaining capacity, but it doesn’t just suddenly go kaput (unless it does, like the Lithium-cobalt cells that exploded all those Dell laptops back in 2006, and which are not in large-format use).
Stay_Sane_Inside_Insanity

It’s important to note that the $7,500 EV tax credit is a tax CREDIT, and NOT a rebate. That means that you only get the full benefit if you pay $7,500 or more in income tax that year.

http://www.sciencethrillers.com/2011/electric-car-quest-msrp-rebates-incentives-leases/
- Mona n Tony Skvarenina
  
  of which 50% of Americans pay Zero income tax!
Joseph Kesselman

As others have said: Regenerative braking is equivalent to “engine braking” in a traditional car, downshifting in order to use the engine primarily as drag rather than as propulsion, and is normally done only when going down particularly long and steep hills (mountain switchbacks, for example) where the brakes might overheat if you relied solely on them.

If you really want to _drive_ in that mode (not recommended, I’m sure), you’d have to learn to come off the pedal gradually. Could be done, but since this probably has little or no advantage to the normal economy mode _unless_ you expect to need near-continuous braking, I think this is a case of “you failed to read the manual.”
- Jim Tuck
  
  Sure, Mark probably needs to learn to modulate his pedal better, but I think they expect it to be treated more like a ‘traffic jam’ mode than a Jake brake.
  
  What are you doing in stop and go traffic? Accelerating a little, then braking to a stop. I once counted the number of times I braked on my commute through Seattle; I stopped counting at a little over 200, and I hadn’t gotten to work yet.
ackpht

A “no frills” interior is a steering wheel, shift lever, and two or three pedals. No instruments, no ventilation, no heating or cooling, no sound system.

I’d say that interior has plenty of frills.
DouglasLucchetti

Think of the money the cars owner will save on taxes; the taxes that are paid at the pump which constitute a significant amount of money collected by the states for roadways operation and maintenance. Anyone got any ideas of just when and/or how that detail will be addressed?
Locobot

It’s really called “Mitsubishi i electric?” Must have been named by the same marketing braniacs that came up with “HDDVD.”
- Andrew Kane
  
  Worse than that, it’s called the “iMiEV”. Robert Llewellyn pronounces it “Eye my EV.”
nixiebunny

There is a B gear on the Prius as well. It produces compression braking for downhill driving, and is not practical to use when on flat land. Think of it as a Jake brake.
tylerkaraszewski

It is ugly.
Moriarty

Electric cars, for whatever reason, have a “wimpy” stigma associated with them. Cars that look like this are not helping, I fear.
- bardfinn
  
  The real issue isn’t that the car does or does not look wimpy – the real issue is people thinking their transportation absolutely must be a status symbol / fashion statement / penis size advertisement / mobile playground / armoured vehicle. The state of automobile culture in America – It’s a giant Prisoner’s Dilemma populated almost entirely by irrational chronic defectors.
  - Moriarty
    
    It’s all very well to say that people ought to think of cars of in a certain way, but it doesn’t change the fact that they don’t. If you want people to buy something, you have to offer them something they want.
    - Brainspore
      
      It’s all very well to say that people ought to think of cars of in a certain way, but it doesn’t change the fact that they don’t. If you want people to buy something, you have to offer them something they want.
      
      The trend of “city-dwellers driving behemoth sports utility vehicles” from the 90s onward didn’t start because there was an underlying consumer desire for oversized, inefficient vehicles. It started because car companies saw the profit potential of convincing customers that they really wanted oversized, inefficient vehicles and spent many millions of dollars doing so.
  - snowmentality
    
    After we bought a Prius and my husband started driving it to work, a few of his co-workers decided to start razzing him for driving a “girly/gay/wimpy” car. (Yeah, they’re real winners.)
    
    He just said “Look, we can all agree that a guy who drives a Hummer has a tiny penis, right? So I drive a Prius … you figure it out.”
- Andrew Kane
  
  It’s a fairly common idea among electric-car enthusiasts that the “wimpy” stigma comes from peoples’ familiarity with electric golf carts. They are tiny and low-powered and slow, and they are an electric vehicle with which many many people are familiar. It’s also true that many street legal electric cars offer underwhelming performance, and in fact some of them use golf-cart components!
  
  However, I personally know a person who has an electric car that does a 9-second quarter mile, several Tesla Roadster owners who have no complaints about performance, and someone who owns an electric F250 that can effortlessly pull several tons (for about ten miles). Power has never been a big problem with electric cars; the problem has always been energy, and how much you can carry with you.
  - Moriarty
    
    I’m not saying electric cars are inherently wimpy. In fact, that was my point. They are capable of shedding that image, and they should.
- GlenBlank
  
  Electric cars, for whatever reason, have a “wimpy” stigma associated with them. Cars that look like this are not helping, I fear.
  
  One of the starting points for Tesla Motors was the realization that, as one of its founders remarked, “Most electric cars were designed by people who don’t like cars.” People who would rather have no cars at all, but see electric cars as at least less harmful.
  
  Tesla’s idea was to produce electric cars that car lovers would love. And a Tesla Roadster is certainly anything but ‘wimpy’. Zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds, in a body based on the Lotus Elise? Definitely not ‘wimpy.’ :-)
  
  Expensive? Certainly. The company wanted to attract buyers who would pay supercar premium prices, so they could bootstrap the next phase – a family sedan designed to compete with cars like Lexus, Mercedes, and BMW. Which they’re currently prepping in the Fremont, CA factory where Toyota Corollas and Tacoma pickups were once built, for sale next year.
  
  And they’re planning to follow that up with an even more affordable mass-market vehicle.
  
  There’s nothing inherently wimpy about electric cars – but you’re quite right that feeble efforts like this, with its low-end trim, anemic power, limited range, and goofball looks don’t help to dispel that idea.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    There’s nothing inherently wimpy about electric cars – but you’re quite right that feeble efforts like this, with its low-end trim, anemic power, limited range, and goofball looks don’t help to dispel that idea.
    
    Yeah, the fender-skirted suppository-shaped hybrids haven’t helped this either. One of the guys I work with drives a Honda Insight, and even he calls it his “little nerdmobile.” I understand the aerodynamic shape is helpful to the car’s economy, but just how important is it that these things must be shaped like Tylenol caplets? All else being equal, how much economy is lost when a car is shaped like, say, a Trans Am? Or maybe a Dodge Magnum? Or some other non-wimpy body style? That Tesla Model S looks quite good (seems to borrow heavily from late-model Jaguars, which is no bad thing), but is still really slippery. Just how important is the drag coefficient? I guess it must be pretty huge, since Tesla went to the trouble of making the door handles in the Model S retract flush with the body except when you approach with the key, when they slide out. Then again, that’s probably just nerd-candy on a level with the Tucker’s center headlight, or the Air Grabber hood scoop on old Plymouth Road Runners.
- digi_owl
  
  Tank on the outside, womb on the inside is the US design parameters i recall reading about…
Andrew Kane

First- you shouldn’t eat the batteries. True, nearly all batteries are toxic. However, gasoline is also toxic, as are the byproducts of its combustion.
Second- this car, and EV’s in general, don’t “rely” on a centralized power grid. It’s true that one exists, and that these cars are capable of using it. However, electricity is electricity, and you can make your own and charge your EV relatively easily and cheaply compared to the cost and effort of refining your own gasoline.
Governments also subsidize the price of gas, particularly in the US, and political price volatility is a fact of life with gasoline as well, as with any other commodity.

In short, every drawback you mention is common to both electric and gas-powered cars. If your point was that cars are bad, then I agree with you. However, in all the areas you mentioned, the electric car is less bad than the gas one.
section9_bateau

I am interested in this car (I thought I had seen the name as the iMev before this), and am considering it a replacement option for my family’s Audi A4. The main problem is I live in Finland, and I have no idea how it will preform in -40 temps on solid ice roads, with mandatory spiked or studded tires.

Charging isn’t an issue, in many places you can both park and charge free if you have an EV (with a very high amperage charging point), while you have to pay with a traditional or hybrid car to even just park.

Every apartment here has a high voltage outlet (usually 230V) for running block heaters and warming cars before use, and it can easily be adjusted to provide constant power, instead of only for 2 hours before use on a timer. These are also not uncommon at offices, and even some stores provide the plugin points.
- Jim Tuck
  
  I imagine it performs a lot like any small sports car from the 60′s or 70′s. It weighs about the same as, has a similar wheelbase to, and gets about the same wheel HP as something like the MGB I currently drive or the Opel GT I used to. I drove the GT through winters in a rather snowy part of the US without the advantage of being able to run studded tires or chains, and it handled it acceptably.
  
  Perhaps you’ve driven a Miata/MX-5? Could you drive one of those in the winter? They have quite of a bit of HP over the iMiev, but should behave similarly in icy conditions where you’re not using that oomph.
http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

21000 US dollars? Its over 65k here in Australia and our dollar is on average worth more than the US dollar. At 21K I would buy one at a pinch. As it is, I can get a house for less than that.
jackie31337

We’re actually planning to buy a full electric as our next car. Most of the models we’ve been looking at are in the 30-40k€ range. The price is significantly higher than other compact cars, but about average for a small-medium car in Finland. With the price of gas currently sitting around $7.88 a gallon (1.54€ per liter) and predicted to go up in the future, the savings on fuel alone almost make it worth the cost.
DavidN6

I took delivery of a Leaf last week. One thing that would help is if shopping malls, places of entertainment, etc (i.e. anywhere where you stay for an hour plus) had charging points. The cost to charge a car for a couple of hours is low compared to their other overheads, and would be a big attraction to go there rather than somewhere where you couldn’t charge.

The car is brilliant around town by the way.
kartwaffles

A rated top speed of only 80 mph? I sure hope that’s electronically limited, rather than limited by the car’s lack of power. Attempting to drive this thing on the freeway would be suicidal.
http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker

BTW, most of the rest of the world gets this car, although a smaller version – the US version is enlarged. (Even Canada gets the rest of world version.)

Also, the reason why they specify electric… in Japan, you can get this with a 660cc gas engine.
Charlie B

My 2002 Mark One Prius, which I bought in 2001, has over 115,000 miles on it, and it’s NiMH battery pack is just fine.
Uthor

$29k is far from “very attractive” for a car that feels “like a standard issue econobox” (and, frankly, barely even looks the part). Looking at cost alone, that’s about what I’ve spent on my GTI plus fuel over the last four years of ownership, and I only average about 1/4 the estimated “fuel economy” of this Mitsubishi.
Charlie B

Foolish things well-meaning people earnestly told me about my Prius in 2001:

* You’ll never recover your investment through gas savings!
* These hybrid things will never succeed in the marketplace!
* Nobody else wants this car, you’ll be the only one who has one!
* You are polluting MORE if you buy a hybrid! Batteries and coal plants!
* You’ll never find anyone who can fix it if it breaks!
* It won’t be as safe as an American car!
* Firefighters won’t rescue you because they are afraid of electrocution!
* The battery will wear out soon and it COSTS MORE THAN THE CAR!

Every one of these things turned out to be completely and utterly untrue, of course.

It’s been a fine car that has served my family well, very reliable and, in the long run, quite inexpensive. The up front cost was pretty painful, though.
http://andreajames.com Andrea James

I’d love to hear your thoughts comparing your first-hand experience with other all-electrics like the Volt and Leaf. I say pitch it to them!
peteraardvark

last summer some UBC engineering students converted a 72 beetle to electric for about 22,000$ (Canadian) and drove across Canada. They were able to recharge at RV parks and campgrounds. It took about 12 days including a day for repairs and a day for waiting out hurricane Earl. The electric cost to drive 6500 kms was $65 or $1 per 100 km.
- David Hall
  
  Where does the $65 price tag come from? You can’t get 11 nights of camping with electric hookups for that.
  - Richard Dagenais
    
    Who knows where they got the numbers from, but a) campgrounds in Canada are dirt cheap, b) they don’t need to account for accommodations in their fuel cost so it may only be a portion of the fees.
    
    Quickly: 150hrs of charging, saturating a single a household circuit with a reasonable load of at most 1500W, at the going rate of 10 cents a kwh is pretty damned cheap.
    - David Hall
      
      Can’t speak to the Beetle conversion, but 150 hrs of charging the Mitsubishi i on a single household circuit will only get you ~500 miles = 800km = 1/8th their trip distance.
      
      The Beetle conversion went ~4000 miles, that would be 50 deep charges of the Mitsubishi i (assuming a generous 80 miles per charge vs its rated 61) at 22.5 hours of charging each. Again we’ll be generous and assume they’re only pulling 1500 watts on their 120v charging system. and we get 1.500*22.5*50 = 1687.5 Kwh. Assume the industrial price of five cents per kilowatt hour and we get $84. A more sane price for electricity and we’re at $130.
      
      So completely believable. We’re well within an order of magnitude of the claimed price using some sane back of the envelope numbers.
      
      I assume they chose campgrounds because of the 30 and 40 amp RV hookups. Their charging system clearly didn’t charge at 120 volts / 12.5 amps.
      - Donald Petersen
        
        Their charging system clearly didn’t charge at 120 volts / 12.5 amps.
        
        Now I’m picturing them parking on a residential street, and running four long extension cords to exterior outlets at four adjacent homes simultaneously in the dead of night. No wonder those hippies drove a Bug!
TimRowledge

Toxic battery? Well if you insisted on eating one I suspect it might prove so – though who knows, maybe all that Lithium might help your depression? On the other hand eating a few spoonfuls of petrol wouldn’t do you much good either. And there are a few vehicle mechanics that have had a poor experience from using gas to wash oily components and then their hands over the years. And I understand that the water table in (for example) San Francisco bay area has been fairly nastily affected by leaked petrol.
Lithium polymer batteries are not very nasty as waste. Lithium is *not* a ‘heavy metal’. It’s very recyclable – as indeed are NiMH batteries – and quite valuable.

Powered by coal? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps power in your area is hydro, or solar, or natural gas, or unicorn farts – as long as it is converted to electricity for transmission purposes these sort of cars can use it. And a centralised power plant might well be more economically cleaned up than hundreds of thousands of individual fossil-fuel engines; is it better to have lots of cars with catalytic converters not performing up to spec as opposed to a single plant with one cleanup system that *could* (in a country with a sensible enforcement regime) be inspected and maintained properly?

Charge times? Not a technical problem with the batteries any more; you can charge LiPos at 5 or even 10C, even the relatively low grade ones we use for model flying. They’re even cheap since the technology turned out to be simple to implement. A full charge in 5 minutes would be easy (remembering that LiPos prefer not to be discharged below 20% nominal) given enough current capacity in the charging station. It takes about that long to pump gas, pay for it, remember to remove the nozzle and close the cap etc. Longer if you go inside to pick up another doughnut and coffee.
TFox

Our local power is nearly all coal. Pretty bad for electrics, right? Maybe not. I calculated the CO2 required for my electric bike vs a standard human powered pedal bike. It turns out that, if the bike rider eats a normal diet, the coal-powered electric bike is actually more climate friendly. There are a lot of buried emissions in a diet containing meat. A car of any kind consumes far more energy, of course, but I think it illustrates how complicated and arbitrary making these kinds of comparisons can be.