Mitsubishi i EV
Posted by Paul Horrell at 4:30PM on Thursday 04 October, 2007 2 Comments
Things got more than a little controversial earlier this year when we stacked a G-Wiz into a crash barrier (watch video).
Green-minded folk - and Boris Johnson, oddly - said variously that we were against the electric car, and against progress, against freedom, against anything that's not a big fat gas guzzler. Nope, we were - still are - against bandwagon-jumping opportunism and gimcrack engineering.
Here's an electric car to love. It's properly safe, unfeasibly quiet, accelerates smoothly as a limo and is real fun to scoot around in. It also costs pennies to recharge. Of course, it won't go far: about 60 miles at the mo, though this is a prototype and the engineers would like to get it up to 80-odd. Is that enough?
For some people in Britain, very possibly yes. They're the ones looking in horror at the London's congestion charge - proposed for many more cities - and noting that councils are giving exemptions on charges and even on parking for electric cars.
Yesterday I drove an ordinary car into London and parked for four hours. Eight quid C-charge, plus £18.50 parking. Imagine if you did that every day as a commute. There must be plenty of two-car households who'd think about swapping the small car for an electric one, on the basis they'd rather do a recharge than a C-charge.
Of course, there are drawbacks. If you don't have off-street parking, you can't exactly trail an extension cord down the pavement overnight.
The Mitsubishi i is already one of the best city cars on the planet because of its ultra-spacious compact bubble shape. The electric version is smoother and quieter and still does 80-odd.
Its motor goes under the boot in place of the absent combustion engine, driving the wheels directly. Slimline waterproofed batteries (lithium-ion like your laptop's) line much of the floor.
From inside, there's all the space the i always had. From outside, there's no change either, except that this one wears a seriously lurid paint job: you're driving the brochure.
At the moment the electric i is Japan-only. But Mitsubishi in the UK is seriously looking, at about £15k. As green taxes for commuters get punitive, that starts to make some kind of sense.
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2 Comments for "Mitsubishi i EV"
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The more effort put into electric cars, the better. Fossil fuels (and energy in general) are only going to get more and more expensive. Even this prototype with a 60-mile range is good enough for the majority of people's commutes (if you commute further than this, then you really should move closer to work or move jobs, rather than waste precious hours in traffic jams on our congested roads). Please import it, Mitsubishi UK.
Firstly, I'm glad you smashed up a G-Wiz because they don't deserve to be on the road and, secondly, I like electric cars that lool like real cars and not little plastic warts.