MINI e
Last November at the Los Angeles Auto Show, MINI announced that it is formally throwing in its hat in into the electric vehicle basket. In fact in a few weeks, 450 MINI fans in California, New Jersey and New York will get their hands and rears behind the first ever 100% emission free, highway legal, all electric vehicle to hit the streets in over a decade. But don’t go rushing off just yet to your MINI dealer. These 450 lucky drivers are part of a pilot project. What exactly is their job? To drive/use the MINI e as their primary mode of transport for a year. Not that this is free though; they will have to pay $850 a month for a years’ (which is almost twice the lease amount for a regular MINI) lease plus taxes and insurance. The $850 monthly lease goes to maintenance, parts replacement and other technical services needed. After a year the vehicles get sent back to BMW-MINI for comparative testing.
Apparently even in these times, the stiff price didn’t put off nearly two thousand people from applying for one of the 450 cars. In order to trim down the number of applications, BMW, the parent company of MINI came up with a checklist or guidelines of sorts. Items such as the existence of a locked garage and daily driving distance are two examples of the guidelines. Incidentally, this program was supposed to have launched last January but for the red tape (as usual) involved in getting the proper certification for the cable connecting the car to the wallbox charger took longer than expected.
Visit the Dallas MINI Car Dealership for more information.