Motley Fool on electric MINI's effect on EV pricing

The Motley Fool, a financial-advice website, just posted an article with the title, "Here's What the Electric Mini Cooper's Price Means for the Future of EVs." The article describes how the MINI's MSRP ($30,750) undercuts that of most of the currently available BEVs in the US market and speculates the MINI's low MSRP will apply pressure on other manufacturers to respond with comparable prices.

Unfortunately, because when this article (and this post) was written MINI has not yet released the EPA range for the MINI Cooper SE, this article quotes the 146-168 mile WLTP range MINI provided, but doesn't explain the range is not the EPA-calculated range. Of course, using two different range-estimation methods doesn't allow a true apples-to-apples comparison with the other BEVs mentioned in the article.

The article mis-states the base $34,990 Tesla Model 3's range as 250 miles. The range of that difficult-to-purchase (no online sales) Tesla Model 3 has recently been boosted from 220 miles to 237 miles. The article also does not reveal that Tesla's $3,750 federal EV tax credit (half of the $7,500 for which the MINI qualifies), will end completely at the end of 2019.

There's another important factor that was likely too involved for an article such as this: battery-cooling technology. The most well-known, entry-level BEV is the Nissan Leaf, which uses air-cooling to regulate the temperature of its batteries. At the same price-point, the MINI Cooper SE offers the much superior method of liquid-cooling its batteries, which will likely provide greater battery life.

Although the article is not fully forthcoming on the range issue, it's good to have the MINI Cooper SE mentioned in a forum not devoted exclusively to automobile enthusiasts.