Delivery Stories

Plug is taken care of. Pays off to have an electrician in the family who redid a ton of wiring for us. I should say I need to decide which EVSE and then install. We may move a plug depending on which I choose. But definitely going with a pluggable one and not hardwired.

 

I am planning to do the same once I order a Mini. I have a 180-mile round trip to my mother-in-law's house. While we have gas cars that can do the trip, I would prefer to go electric! I want to have an outlet installed in her garage and take my charger with me.

 

Yes! This is another great reason to go with a plug-in EVSE. I am trying to convince family members whom I visit often to install 14-50 outlets. I've even offered to pay for the outlet and the electricity.

 

Lol - yes - I would definitely need to pay for the outlet, and I'm thinking I would also just hand her a $10 bill when I visit just so she does not stress about the electricity being used. (she does stress about utility bills) I have no idea how much a level 2 "charging session" actually costs, but figure $10 would cover it generously. Maybe?

 

At the very most, 30kW (the useable capacity of the battery) x your rate per kWh, something between $0.05 and $0.25, probably. So, somewhere between $1.50 and $7.50 ish.

 

Depends on where you are. National average is about $0.12/kWh. The Mini has 28.9kWh usable, and the charger maybe is 90% efficient (so maybe 32.1kWh from the wall). So empty to full costs, on average, $3.85. If you are in California, the rates are through the roof, and easily 3x that much.

 

You should be able to get a build ID from your dealer once the order is submitted, from there you can use mygarage.miniusa.com (is there an equivalent in other countries?) to track status from prebuild to delivery.

I saw this from a dealer elsewhere:

Any orders we place now, aren’t being started until December. From there, 8-12 weeks for it to arrive.​

 

At my local rate (around $0.10 to $0.11) that would be $3.20 to $3.50. Cool.

 

I saw that same thing and called her out on why we're being told differently. The 8-12 weeks once production starts doesn't match up either.

Am I misunderstanding how long it takes to get a build ID? I was told and thought I also read that ID is not produced immediately after ordering but a few weeks later.

 

I have a cheap 32/16/13/10A Duosida EVSE with a 14-50 plug. I made a simple 120V adapter by wiring L1 to "hot", L2 to "common", ground to ground, and leaving "common" on the 14-50 outlet open. The EVSE and car worked flawlessly in this configuration, and the adapter is really easy to make.

 

I believe the ID is produced rather quickly when the Oxford Plant gets the order, but when I ordered my SE my dealer said it would take a week or two to submit to MINI since they submit a bunch of vehicle orders at a time. I didn't know about this so I didn't get the ID from my sales rep until my SE was already through the assembly process. I missed out on the excitement of watching it being built, but got to agonize over the actual delivery process.

 

That matches up with what I was told. I hopefully should get the ID soon. I was told 2-3 weeks but I think this is because not everyone is back full time and the manager does it in batches. I plan to follow up next week if my sales person doesn't contact me before then. Both the manager and sales person have been good about contacting me though.

 

Any news? How’d it go? No pictures?


Sent from my iPhone using Inside EVs

 

Sorry about the late and long reply. Yesterday was so busy and tiring. We spent a little more than three hours in the dealership and most of time was at finance manager's office. Trying to explain the guy that $500 is a credit to a finance manager seemed impossible at that time. He would not just look at the simple calculation and figured out which part on his end was wrong or wanted to verify with the sell's manager. I know the fact most of Mini are custom ordered and we are not the first customers he has to deal with the deposit paid earlier. What a pain! Then move on trying sell us the tint and basic maint package. Basic maint package was $1649 including everything EV doesn't need, but he pointed out that we will need break pad and disc will need to be replaced within 4 years (basic maint package covers) which will cost us $1800. So the basic maint package will pay itself off by that time. I said no and he won't take that as an answer.

We have 2016 Honda Civic, brought it brand new and has almost 100K miles on it, even that we haven't changed the break pads yet, but the rear ones will need to be replaced soon. Honda is well known to put thin break pads on especially the rear ones. We are not really driving the cars hard.

Keep telling him no, then he switched to the different method and telling us about the firmware will need to be updated in 4 years otherwise the car won't be able to drive. It will throw out error codes. How ridiculous that sounds like!! At that point, I told him if that is the case, your maint package won't be able to cover it, the warranty should be able to cover it. On top of that, does he even know what firmware do to the car?? 4 yrs firmware failure?? I told him if the car firmware failures occur within 4 yrs and he knows about it and just want to sell the maint package, he will class action lawsuit on his hands. That shut him up about it.

Oh my gosh, the trouble we had to go through with this guy was unbelievable. This really made Tesla delivery shine here. They make an appointment with you, you show up, they take you to the back room, inspect the car, sign the documents, show you some accessories if you are interested, then you are done! So much better!!!

I asked my sales person how many MINI Cooper SE he delivers within a month, he said it is not a lot, around 5 per month. Honestly speaking, this is why the tradition dealerships don't like EVs, no added-ons they can really sell to you and not much maint money they can make from you, they have to come out some creative lies to trick you to buy some useless stuffs or do some unnecessary maint. Be careful out there.

 

Oops, forgot to attach pictures!! Love my Jellybean!!!

 

Stories like this make me even more appreciative of my recent experience with Seattle Mini.

 

I just wonder how many Seattle Mini like dealerships are out there, I will travel to there to buy car from them!

 

So sorry to hear about your experience! My dealer in the Twin Cities is the opposite of that, super nice and friendly and easy to work with. Finance manager even chuckled along with me about the inappropriateness of the extended warranty for the SE.

Nice-looking SE. That Enigmatic Black is such a great color.