To take the plunge or not without a demo

I am honored that you imagine I'm an expert, but I'm just a lurker here who ordered a MINI Electric last October. My MINI left the factory almost 3 weeks ago, but for reasons no one can/will tell me, it remains sitting in a UK port, pining for a boat ride west.

Here are my expert justifications for you to order a MINI Electric:

1. You know why MINI Coopers are desirable because you own one
2. You have rationalized your range requirements and evaluated your potential charging options
3. You won't be penalized for canceling your order if you decide the MINI Cooper SE won't work for you
4. If you choose to bail after driving one, almost any other car you pick will be much more readily available

 

The opinions of @Matt Shumaker, whose family has driven their SE more than 3,000 miles should help you decide.

 

You'd never guess from all my enthusiasm for the MINI Electric that I have never driven or ridden in a BMW MINI, much less test-driven an SE. The last MINI I was "in" was my 1968 Morris Mini Moke, which I sold 25 years ago. It was 50% more alliterative than the Austin Mini Moke.



Note that in ancient times, the appellation was the all lowercase "mini" vs BMW's all uppercase "MINI."

 

Personally I would never buy a car without several test drives.

 

You exhibit more common sense than I do. I ordered my first Honda Insight a year before it went on sale (I didn't need a test drive before buying my 2nd gen-1 Insight). I ordered my Clarity Plug-In Hybrid 6 months before it went on sale. I ordered my lost-in-shipment MINI Cooper SE last October and it's a good thing I didn't wait for a test-drive before ordering because then it probably wouldn't get here until 2022! At this rate, it may not get here before 2021.

 

I think you should file a complaint with MINI/BMW corporate. Let them know how botched the whole process is..

 

Me? Common sense? Ha! Clearly you don't know me!

 

I doubt anything I could say would be news to them. With the downturn in sales, I'm sure the company wants my money as soon as they can get it, but there must be forces beyond their control that have prevented the car they made for me a month ago from finding its way across the Atlantic. The policeman who will be awarding me with my first speeding ticket in 47 years will have to wait a little longer.

But get this for irony: I wrote many, many letters to BMW/MINI in 3 countries, begging them to let me pay $1500 to have the scoopless base MINI hood on my SE, but they were ignored. So I have been working with a local body shop to have them do the swap for me. Now that my car has been sitting in a port parking lot for more than a month, the body shop says they may have to charge me extra to mask and spray the slightly faded front fenders to blend with the newly painted hood. How much fading could have taken place in rainy Britain? I guess the longer it sits there, the greater chance of fading. My wife was already unhappy that the cure for my hood-scoop phobia was going to be so expensive and now it may cost even more than $1500.

 

You can get at least $1500 off MSRP.
Checkout this thread https://www.insideevsforum.com/community/index.php?threads/discounts-off-msrp.9142/

 

Heat is the enemy of EV batteries. That's why the liquid-cooled battery setup in the MINI Cooper SE is so much better than the air-cooled batteries in a Nissan Leaf or a VW e-Golf.

Look at it this way: If your battery fails sooner than a northern MINI's battery, you're more likely to be within the warranty period. My gen-1 Insight's battery failed after 8 years, 2 months. The warranty was 8 years. Fortunately, Honda was nice and made me pay for only the labor to replace it.

I'm sad that all MINI's have heated side mirrors that are heated all the time. Same with the heated windshield-washer fluid. It doesn't make a big difference in the gas-powered MINIs, but heating things that don't need heating reduces range in the MINI Electric. I don't know how much they reduce range, but they certainly don't extend it.

 

Our Clarity PHEV gets 47-55 miles of EV range in the summer, but only 35 miles or so in the winter. MINI claims the design of the CATL battery in the MINI Cooper SE is less prone to cold-weather range-reduction than the BMW i3 with its Samsung slab-style battery.

From a purely physical point of view, a slab of battery underneath a car would seem to be more difficult to keep warm than a battery that shares the interior space of the car with the humans, as does the MINI's. I don't know if the CATL battery has some kind of cold-weather coping technology that makes it better than a Samsung battery.

Rather than reducing range, I believe hot weather threatens the longevity of a battery. Like most auto manufacturers, MINI likely took the SE to Death Valley to test its cooling system. They don't want to spend money replacing 32.6 kWh batteries under warranty.

 

My wife and I have happily owned a BMW i3 with range extender for more than 2 years. We bought the car with my wife in mind, but it's now largely driven by our teenage daughter. The i3 has totally sold us on the benefits of an electric car for in town usage. Consequently, in February we ordered an electric Mini, not least because it's based on the i3. Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to drive an electric Mini courtesy of the selling dealer. I came away extremely impressed—it's much more fun to drive than our i3—and look forward to taking delivery of ours, which I'm told should arrive sometime in the fall. My only disappointment is that the Mini's not more radical. Mind you, radical hasn't done the i3 any favors in the marketplace, which is probably why BMW has taken the conventional route with the Mini.

 

My exact sentiments. I used to be a VW driver, but when they went to a generic sedan style, and now SUV, they lost the "magic" in my mind (VW even stopped making the Beetle in 2019). Been driving MINIs ever since.

As much as I wanted an EV, Tesla never appealed to me from a style standpoint (let alone cost). Technically they are great cars, but style-wise do nothing for me. Other options, like Nissan Leaf and the BMW i3, just look too goofy to me. Europe has quite a few attractive EVs, but they won't come to the US market.

MINI may not be for everyone, but for me it's a perfect mix of handling and character. And the SE range may seem a bit on the low side, but unlike ICE vehicles you can "top it off" every day at home with no effort.