Li-ion Motors Hacked Mini Cooper Goes 120 miles Per Charge

Contributing Monkie

Published on May 17, 2010

Filed Under Alternative Vehicles Tags

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mincooper convertible Li ion Motors Hacked Mini Cooper Goes 120 miles Per Charge

Let’s get something straight. I love the look of BMW’s Mini Cooper and would buy it in a second — if only it were a hybrid diesel or an all-electric car with interface fabric seats. Sadly BMW doesn’t make the Mini with any of these options, so I have held off and continue riding my bike.

Maybe that is all about to change. Companies like Li-ion Motors have begun hacking small cars like the Mini and replacing their gas engines with zero-emission, all-electric motors and lithium batteries. A great idea — if you can afford to pay almost twice the price for a “converted” Mini. Parts are expensive to do this one at a time. The only way the price will come down is if, BMW and other companies decide there is a real demand and they start producing them. After the jump, watch a short clip by Popular Mechanics featuring a test drive of the hacked, all-electric Mini Cooper.

Here is part of an article on the subject by Popular Mechanics:
“What may come as a surprise to anybody interested in driving electric is that you can have one of these vehicles right now, for about $50,000. The week after they let us drive their electric roadster, Hybrid Technologies brought a lithium ion-powered Mini Cooper by our New York offices for a test drive (see video) to show us, not the future of electric cars, but the present. Hybrid avoids the cost of developing a ground-up electric vehicle by ripping the powertrains out of standard vehicles and replacing those guts with electric innards.”

You can buy your own electric car conversion straight from li-ionmotors.com.



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