The MINI-ME Electric Mini Cooper Clubman EV Conversion Introduction

One of the most fascinating things about the Mini Cooper Clubman, I think, is this back door area. This is kind of ingenious. Of course, they stretched the car to have a little more backseat room and a little bit more cargo area, but the way they did the doors is just fascinating.

They swing to the side and they really swing completely clear on both sides. They're held with this strut and then you have this cargo compartment in here. There's a little sunscreen we can remove in just a half a dozen easy lessons and below here you can store cargo.

This fairly easily lifts out and you have more area underneath, including some tie-downs. But as Rob Papil says, wait, there's more. Beneath that is another panel that you remove to reveal a spare tire and tool compartment.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the kind of spare tires that everyone gives you now, which is sort of a donut that's reasonably useless. With an electric car, we'll keep it in the garage and come get it if we have a flat. We shouldn't be that far away.

Let me show you this compartment because it's ideal for batteries. So inside here, we've got a tray with our tools and actually a spare tire underneath that even. That's all contained in this well, which is quite deep and probably extends below the car about as far as we want to go with batteries.

I think this is going to be an ideal location for battery storage. Here's the spare tire underneath and as you can see, it's quite deep and pretty good size. Once we lose the spare, our intention is to cut this out, build a battery box pretty much the width of the car, extending down the depth this current box now does.

The passenger side of the car is similarly interesting. The Mini Cooper actually has a surprising amount of headroom and shoulder room and legroom in the front compartment. Indeed, they advertise the Clubman as having room for four six and a half foot tall basketball stars to get in and out of.

I'm not going to haul any basketball stars, but the way they do that is with this club door, which then gives you access to the rear seating area. By pulling this, you can kind of open up the front seat and you see quite a bit of seating that's actually sitting right on top of the gas tanks, which are underneath it. As you'll see in a series to come, that's a pretty interesting removal.

We're going to remove the back seats, remove the gas tanks from underneath and cut out that section, brace it up as it's kind of a unibody type car into two squares and mount boxes in there as well. So if we have to, we can go too tall in this area and still have our cargo area and back for groceries or tools or hardware from the hardware store. I'm not likely to haul around a basketball team, so a two seater would work great, but I would like a little more room for just groceries and dry cleaning and that sort of thing than we had in the Speedster.

So that's about it for the introduction on the Mini Cooper Clubman. It's a fascinating car. One of the negatives, frankly, and we came very close to bailing on the conversion of this car because of one enormous negative that I'm having a little difficult time getting around, and that's basically, this is among the first of the Mini Coopers under the BMW regime.

They've had five or six years now to get their engineering in the game and that's about the length of time it takes to work on new models. And I have to tell you, as an internal combustion engine automobile, for its size and its cost, about $32,000 all loaded new, this is one of the nicest little cars I've ever driven. It has superb handling characteristics and great acceleration while maintaining superb, unusually good fuel economy.

And so I think this is a great car. It'll make a great conversion, but it's actually had us thinking twice about whether to attack it at all. Ultimately, it's a car.

We're on fire over the prospects of electric drive as an option, and so we're going to chop this up into little pieces, put them back together, and see if we can make them run on batteries. Normally, if you have a good car that handles well and is efficient on gasoline, it'll handle better and be more efficient when you convert it to electric drive. So that's what we're going to do.

Stay with us and we'll start talking about some of the issues, weight and balance and brakes and so forth, to get this electric car conversion underway.