As for me, I’ve been mad busy all year except for a four-week break in the summer. Not that it was much of a break, as this magazine kept me at it with events at Goodwood, Silverstone and Brands Hatch, and tests of everything from hybrids to Ferraris.
Of course, I can’t complain, but it was almost a relief to get back into my normal routine – which, since you ask, includes commuting to the studio on a Friday morning and driving back late at night, past all my male viewers laying the groundwork for the hangovers they’ll enjoy during Saturday Kitchen.
Often I get a buzz out of driving around in something before it goes on sale. People do tend to notice you. But this week I’ve got something that’s not even close to being on sale. It might look like a normal Mini, but this is my first ever test of a research prototype, the all-electric Mini E. BMW has made a handful of these and given them to people to test for a year, to see how they perform under real-world, real-family conditions. Well, I don’t know how anyone else found it, but I reckon there’s a long way to go before the Mini E is ready to go on sale.
Actually, that’s not quite true – the car itself is great; it’s the battery life that’s rubbish. I found the same with the Tesla electric sports car, and as far as I know there’s no electric car that’s immune.
Let me tell you what I mean. The day it arrived, the car’s power meter told me I had 140 miles’ worth of juice. Great, I thought, and off I went to the shops and back – ten miles each way. When I got home it said I had 80 miles left. Eh? I know I failed my maths GCSE, but I’m pretty sure that’s 40 miles less than it should have been.
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