BMW is planning to build 500 all-electric Mini Coopers—and they're coming to California to help the automaker meet the new zero-emissions mandate. The mandate requires car manufacturers to build 7,500 non-polluting cars by 2014. The report quotes unnamed BMW sources as saying that 490 of the cars will be leased to selected customers, while the remaining 10 electric Minis will be used as show cars.
"This step will allow the BMW Group to gain an initial knowledge of how mobility can be achieved efficiently using purely electrically powered vehicles," Dr. Norbert Reithofer, BMW's management board chair, said in the report. "Our task here is to combine the ultimate driving experience with an efficient electrified drive with practically no emissions."
The Mini EV is the work of BMW's Project i, a program launched earlier this year to develop low-emission city cars. There's no word on when BMW will bring the cars to California, but most of the automakers working on EVs plan to have them on the road by 2010.
Photo of a conventional Mini by Mini USA.
Source: Technoride
