Interesting Long Term Review - Observations on Range

Tommy Electric

Tommy Electric

Active Member
Greetings all. I'm a new member on these boards and have enjoyed reading through the various threads and discussions that have been posted.

I'm from Australia and currently have a Mini SE on order. Like many others here, I've been looking to make the interminable wait a little more bearable by watching just about every video on the SE available on Youtube. I recently watched this review from a long term (ie. 6 month) driver of the SE.



As a soon to be owner, I always find these reviews more useful than those produced by people who have only had a few days to spend with the car. The reviewer is highly complimentary describing the SE as "really quite an exceptional little car" based, primarily, on the driving experience. I was, however, perplexed by his observations on range (viewable at around the 3.00 minute mark) where he states that he's struggled to get up to 100 miles of range. This seems to be in stark contrast to just about every other video I've seen where most drivers are reporting no problem in reaching the estimated range and are frequently exceeding it. Not sure what to make of this other than assume that he has been driving it in Sport mode without much thought for energy conservation? Curious to hear the thoughts of others and thanks for providing lots of useful information and helping me through the long, painful wait for my car to arrive.
 
Thanks for sharing this. His two primary concerns - the 100 mile range he was getting, as well as the the car not looking quite as "Cooper S" sporty as he would like - would not be issues for me. The use case in my household would be the Mini would be a "secondary" car used by me, and my son would inherit my current SUV to drive to school. We still have other gas powered vehicles that can handle longer road trips if range and lack of charging stations keep the Mini in the garage.

But his description of how it handles cracked me up! "...it just seems to dig its front tires into the tarmac like a cat digging its claws into your cottons and just says 'right! Let's go!'."
 
The "Out of Spec Motoring" guys on Youtube (In USA) got 132 miles in green mode. That was a mostly highway run at 56 mph. Weird for there to be that big a difference. But I know there are so many factors to consider. (terrain, temperature, speed)
 
F14Scott said:
Of course his range suffers: being in Australia at the bottom of the world, all his driving is uphill.
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I’m in Australia, he’s in Scotland. :)

fizzit said:
They only get 96 miles in this video, even in Green Mode +. The only similarity I see is that they're both in the UK, maybe driving on the wrong side of the road makes the range worse.
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This reviewer was only driving the car for a few hours so I tend to view it as a less useful gauge of range than someone who’s had the car for six months.

GvilleGuy said:
The "Out of Spec Motoring" guys on Youtube (In USA) got 132 miles in green mode. That was a mostly highway run at 56 mph. Weird for there to be that big a difference. But I know there are so many factors to consider. (terrain, temperature, speed)
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Definitely. Although the review I posted was produced by a guy who had spent six months with the car. One would assume that he was driving in all sorts of conditions during that time hence why I come back to driving style.

For me personally, I can adapt to the low range but will be disappointed if I can’t 100+ miles out of a full charge.
 
GvilleGuy said:
The "Out of Spec Motoring" guys on Youtube (In USA) got 132 miles in green mode. That was a mostly highway run at 56 mph. Weird for there to be that big a difference. But I know there are so many factors to consider. (terrain, temperature, speed)
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I believe this is the video to which you refer.
 
Tommy Electric said:
For me personally, I can adapt to the low range but will be disappointed if I can’t 100+ miles out of a full charge.
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This is really the first time I've seen anyone say range was so low. Almost every experience shows the car goes much further than the official range. I personally get over 120 miles of range per charge even while I'm spending 90% of the time at freeway speeds greater than 60mph. I'm easily getting more than 4 mi/kWh.

Here's my trip from this morning's commute - 41 miles on the freeway (give or take), still 73 miles to go. This was green mode, high regenerative braking, and using cruise control. I know from experience I'll get home with about 48% battery (SoC) left. The efficiency of the SE is impressive.

commute.webp
 
Thanks for that data point. @Puppethead As an aside, I’d be really interested to hear about the functionality of the Mini Connected app and what it can do that you find useful.

I also agree that the reviewer’s comments on range seem to contradict most impressions I’ve seen from long term drivers of the vehicle.
 
We’ve had ours for over 2 months now. Love it! The thing to do is totally ignore the range indicator and look at the battery instead. Using simple maths it’s easy to work out how many miles per percentage of battery you are getting. Ours works out at around 140 on average. We do tend to always use green mode though. I was worried about range anxiety, but now don’t. We have an ‘agile’ electric tariff so sometimes won’t charge every night to take advantage of the cheapest rate we can. Been as low as 2p per kWh.


Sent from my iPhone using Inside EVs
 
Toi said:
of note, you can also change the 'brake force' where you can alter how much deceleration is required to 'trigger' the brake light on regen.
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I'm surprised the regen-deceleration brake-light threshold is adjustable. This news may eventually get me to try Bimmercode. My visible brake light would be very useful when fiddling with this setting.
 
In my quest to watch every Youtube review of the Mini Cooper SE ever made, I stumbled upon one reviewer that claimed a brand new car will not get the best range out of the battery and that after about 15-20 charging cycles, the efficiency of the battery will improve. Has anyone heard, or read, anything similar to this?
 
It's not true in a Tesla. Brand spanking new batteries deliver the most juice.

However, because Teslas allow customers to use the entire range of their batteries' capacity (charging to 100% and draining to 0%), and because most customers don't touch both extremes, the car's computer doesn't always report the perfectly calibrated range. There are countless threads on the Tesla boards by people who are pissed that their Teslas are losing range fast, when the cars will actually drive just as far, it's just that the computer doesn't *predict* they will drive just as far.

As we've seen with the SE, "How far will it go?" is a complicated question.
 
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