ELECTRIC CAR LEASING:THE FUTURE of – at least more affordable – plug-in transportation is now available for lease in the US, writes KEN BENSINGER
In the next few weeks, 450 consumers in California, New York and New Jersey will begin picking up fully-electric Mini coupés, charging them at home and using them on their daily commutes for the next year.
They’ll pay $850 (€627) a month, plus taxes and insurance, for the right to drive the first road-legal electric cars costing less than €75,000 to be found on the roads in more than a dozen years. As such, they will serve as pioneers in what’s being hailed as the next great moment in automobile history: the electric-car era.
Never mind that the lease on a Mini E is twice that of a regular Mini, or that since the battery fills up the back seat, it fits just two people, said Nick Howell, a Los Angeles-based technology consultant who’s getting one. “I’m just excited to get a real car that is only powered by electricity,” he said.
Howell, his wife, and several hundred other soon-to-be Mini E drivers got a first look at the car one evening last week at the California Science Centre in Los Angeles, where BMW, which owns Mini, threw a party reminiscent of a school pep rally.
Drink in hand, Howell stared across a room full of giddy fellow-lessees savouring a buffet dinner and gushing over the cheery little electric vehicles (EVs), which zip to 60 miles per hour in 8.5 seconds and top out at 95 mph. “This is going to be an adventure,” Howell said.
Nearly a decade after the short-circuiting of the first modern attempt to jump-start electric transportation – in the form of the EV1 from General Motors, Toyota’s RAV4 EV and other electric test cars – the auto industry is back on the switch.
The one-year Mini E pilot programme is a precursor to what experts say could be an explosion of relatively affordable electric cars. “This is a sign of what’s coming,” said Edward Kjaer, director of the Electric Transportation Division at Southern California Edison, which is working with automakers including BMW and Ford to develop electric vehicles and infrastructure. “The real fun is going to start next year.”
That’s when GM is due to release its plug-in electric Volt. Hot on its heels is Ford, which last week said it would invest $550 million (€404 million) to retool a Michigan factory that will make electric versions of its Focus, due out in 2011. Mitsubishi Motors is set to start selling its own EV next year.
For its part, BMW does not plan to make a mass-produced version of the Mini E. Instead, it will use data from the lease programme to help produce an electric vehicle which it plans to start selling in the US in 2012.
A group of start-ups are racing to deliver electron-fired vehicles. Among them are Fisker Automotive, which promises a plug-in hybrid in about a year. Tesla Motors last year began selling the $109,000 Roadster, the first all-electric, road-legal vehicle to be sold (rather than leased) in the US since before the second World War.
The industry’s electric vehicle push is being aided by the Obama administration, which included $2.4 billion in funding for the vehicles in the stimulus bill passed earlier this year.
Consumer awareness of electric vehicles is rising, helped in part by the spike in gasoline prices last year, as well as a growing buzz online. At least half a dozen of the people selected to lease the Mini E have started blogs detailing the experience. – ( LA Timesservice)