Video: Mitsubishi i-MiEV

Now the I is this small car which has been sold in Asian markets since 2005, it's the MiEV that makes it electric. First, a couple of notes about the car itself. A lot of people think it looks like a smart car and my opinion it's actually smarter and that's because it has a back seat, it seats four. There's was also pretty good cargo room especially if you fall down one or both of the rear seats. Now you probably wonder about the charging. This cable comes with the car, the actual charging device is on board. So all you need to do is plug into 220 volts on one end. If you don't have that in your garage, you can put this adapter on it and you get plain old 110 volts. Now what you do on the other end, it's just like any gas car. You pop the door here with a lever in the front and here's the port, you plug the pistol grip into it. And basically if you're charging a fully depleted battery, at 220 volts, it'll do it in seven hours, at 110 volts it's 14 hours, that's the quick way. Now there's also a port on the other side. This one's pretty serious. As you can see that's a big port. This is for level three, high voltage three-phase power. It'll charge the battery from zero to 80% in 30 minutes. Now aside from being on the other side, 'cause this is Japanese spec car, the driving experience is similar to any, you turn a knob to turn it on and then you've got your gear selector in a sense, park, reverse, neutral, drive and then there's eco and B. Drive is like any other gas car or hybrid it goes. Electric cars make no noise when they accelerate but after you reach a certain speed in this one, you definitely start to hear a lot of wind noise and tire noise and it's susceptible to cross winds in the driving kind of like a smart for two. Now there's a lot of guesswork and figuring out whether you have enough range to get where you wanna go. There is a power gauge, a fuel gauge effectively that has about 16 segments in it. It all depends on how you drive, whether you have hills, windows open, if you have the headlights on and the headlights are LED so they don't draw much. A big difference though is the air conditioning and the heat, both of which are electric in this car. Now you can see the effect just by turning on the air conditioning. There's a distance till empty meter here in kilometers, it's 69 but as soon as he turned the air conditioning on, it goes down to 54 showing your range is shorter. The I-MiEV was fun to drive, it burned no gasoline, yes but at the same time 80 to 100 miles of range is in a lot if you're accustomed to a gas car or a hybrid and remember this isn't a really small light car. So to me even though this did the job, the idea that electric cars are going to replace gas cars soon especially is optimistic maybe just playing wrong. <v Presenter>For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog kickingtires.net.