MINI-ME Mini Cooper EV Conversion Introduction

Hello again, I'm Jack Rickard, and this is our next electric car project, a 2009 Mini Cooper Clubman. The Mini Cooper was born out of the British Motor Car Corporation in 1959. They came out with a very economical model called the Mini.

In 1960, racing legend John Cooper took the shine to the car, got involved, and they called it since then the Mini Cooper. He actually raced Coopers for a while. In 2002, BMW took over the Mini Cooper label.

It's still manufactured in London, but we're starting to see some of the effects of German engineering on the car, and we very much like what we see. In 2009, they introduced the Clubman version, which has a three-inch longer wheelbase and a nine-inch longer body with a back door that opens almost like a little mini SUV. The car has developed quite a cult following among a number of people.

In fact, there's racing clubs for Minis, there's people who restore Minis, but we think they've really brought it to kind of a state-of-the-art. The car has a lot of the latest in electronics and control features, including an electronic variable speed or ratio, rack and pinion steering, ABS braking systems, the latest Bluetooth to hook up your Apple iPhone, and of course heated seats, climate control, all the modern accoutrements of a modern technology-driven automobile. This is somewhat in contrast to what we did with the Porsche Speedster, which was a fairly simple 1957 technology.

With the Cooper, what we hope to do is introduce you to a number of the concepts of things that you'll run into in dealing with converting a more modern car, and in many ways a more desirable car, to electric drive. The Mini Cooper is a good candidate in that it's quite lightweight and very aerodynamic. This car gets about 27 miles per gallon in the city and about 37 on the highway, and actually driving it around, we were seeing 31 or 32 even in a small town.

An efficient gasoline car, if you remove the internal combustion engine and install an electric motor, you have a more efficient electric car, but we look for fuel efficiency and aerodynamics in donor cars. The Clubman is kind of interesting. Right now, BMW is doing a test series of 500 of their S model.

We wanted a little more room for batteries, and we're not quite up to BMW design engineers here in Jack's Garage, so by having the nine inches additional space inside, we think we can do the car justice with regards to range and performance. The Mini Cooper has quite a bit of room in the back, and I'll show you here in a minute the the back doors and some of the access in it. We're going to convert this not only using electric air conditioner compressors, electric water heaters to maintain the environmental control, pumps for the power brakes, but we're also going to go to a little bit different power plant in this one.

In Beck Speedster, we used a pretty basic, although a very strong, net gain warp nine motor. That's a DC series motor, fairly simple design. In the case of the Mini, and really we think the future of electric cars belong to AC induction motors with three-phase controllers.

This involves quite a bit more electronics in the controller, but it offers a number of advantages. The AC motors are slightly more efficient, but they also allow things like regeneration and a lot of instrumentation opportunities that are a little more difficult with the DC motor. So we're going from a basic car and a basic EV conversion to a much more advanced car in engineering and technology sense, and also a more advanced drivetrain with that.

We think the result will be a no compromises EV conversion that has all the creature comforts that you're accustomed to in a car that you might use as a daily driver. Air conditioning, heat, heated seats, power mirrors, windshield wipers, defoggers, the entire gamut. And we're going to try to make this into an electric car with a modern power plant that'll be on par with what BMW is doing, and we'll see how we do compared to them.

It'll be interesting. We should get done just about the time they're taking all theirs back from the lease program in order to shred them. Converting an EV is indeed a process of small problem solving.

Most of them are not insurmountable. All of them look a little bit like problems. And I think one of the things to do is not get in a hurry.

Don't develop a whole lot of anxiety over it. Take each problem in turn, and simply work it off as best you can. I think you'll find along the way that you have more skills than you think you have.

And hopefully with the help of the videos, you'll kind of see how we addressed many of the things that you're going to run into. So let's take a look around the car and see what we've got to work with here, and then we'll get started.