Mini gears up for first electric car with one-of-a-kind classic upgrade
Can’t wait for Mini’s first all-electric model to be released in 2019? The wait won’t be over for a while yet, but in the meantime the company has converted a classic Mini to run on electricity.
The car, produced for the New York International Auto Show, is a converted classic Mini Cooper 1959 model, which ended production in 2000, before BMW relaunched the car brand.
No mention was made of the conversion’s range — a key bottleneck for electric vehicles — although with the model not having been built from the ground up to be electric, we can’t imagine it would be particularly efficient.
Meanwhile, the company’s mass-market Mini Coopers aren’t expected to be with us until 2019. These models will retain the look of the modern models, and have so far been showed off in early concept footage.
For now, environmentally conscious Mini owners will have to make do with a plug-in hybrid model of the Mini Cooper Countryman, which gets around 25 miles of range in its fully electric mode.
Along with an electric Vespa that’s expected to be released in 2018, Porsche’s Mission E, and a new electric Black Cab, traditional car companies are racing to convert their flagship vehicles to electric models.
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