WHITE PLAINS, NY — The BMW Mini E is a solid little electric ride that provides a comfortable, effortless driving experience with all of the usual small-car perks, plus an ultra cheap operating cost and a carbon footprint approaching zero. But as a $50,000 two-seater with no head-turning quotient, the pitch for this first cousin of the Mini Cooper won't be so much to our inner rock star as our inner Al Gore.

Tooling around a busy interstate and the city streets of White Plains, it is easy to forget this is a pure electric vehicle, and something of a prototype at that: There are only about 450 Mini E's on the road, driven by an unusually generous band of volunteer beta testers who pay $850 a month for the privilege of helping BMW work out the kinks before the car's anticipated launch in 2012. They have no dibs on their cars and will not be allowed to buy them when the lease ends. All maintenance, and car insurance, is paid by BMW.

And, of course, nobody pays for the gas.

"These are the future," says James Van Nostrand, who invited us to drive his Mini E. Van Nostrand, executive director of the Pace University Energy and Climate Center (great fit, BMW) is a conversant passenger who describes a not-too-distant future when millions of plug-ins become an army of "mobile storage units" on the electric grid, sucking up power on the cheap overnight and selling it back — at a profit, mind you — during peak daylight hours.

In this dream world the utility pays you to drive your car. But even if that never happens, the out-of-pocket cost of driving this car is so small that it materially lowers the total cost of ownership, even given the sticker price: At 18 cents per kilowatt/hour, it costs less than $5 to travel the car's approximate 100-mile range. In an internal combustion vehicle that gets 17 mpg, gas at the pump would have to cost 85 cents a gallon to compete.

A fatter pipe — a 32-amp cable BMW is just making available, plugged into a 220 volt line — cuts the fill-up time for the 35 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery to a mere 4.5 hours. That's down from the 24 hours it takes with the 12-amp cable that plugs into any 110 volt outlet. With that kind of recharge speed, Van Nostrand speculates, charging up could be offered as inducements by restaurants, shopping malls and theaters — places where people might tend to spend two or three hours anyway, so topping off isn't lost time. Like the free Wi-Fi coffee shops use to lure customers to lattes, ubiquitous plug-in privileges could make a spontaneous EV lifestyle possible.

Power and range is always the issue with EVs. Indeed, the most prominent gauge in the Mini E is for the battery, located just below the windshield. In the center of the dashboard is the speedometer — as if speed in such a car is a novelty that both passengers would enjoy monitoring. It's also a good 10 inches in diameter, large enough to be seen in the back seat, if there was a back seat (BMW yanked it to make room for the 573-pound battery). The Mini has always had a huge speedo, but with so little real estate on the dashboard it's a peculiar design choice.

There are some clues that this isn't your grandfather's BMW, or even your brother's Mini Cooper. There is, of course no viscerally-satisfying sport-car roar as it reaches highway speeds. While it does fine in mid-range acceleration, from a standstill the car is basically a glorified golf cart, slowish off the mark. It's hard to imagine Mark Walhberg and Charlize Theron eluding capture in The Italian Job in one of these babies. BMW cites a zero to 62 mph time of 8.2 seconds, which isn't terribly quick. The motor produces 150 kilowatts (about 201 horsepower), but the car weighs 3,230 pounds. Easing up on, er, the gas also decelerates the vehicle, so drivers who are familiar with manual transmission trick of engine braking will delight in the easily acquired ability to use the actual brake very rarely.

We entered highway traffic going at sub-city speeds, because of a stalled vehicle, so I couldn't play chicken with commuters to fully test the stand-still acceleration. But we reached speed quick enough and when the field cleared and getting from 50 to 80+ was fast and effortless. Unfortunately, at these law-breaking but sometimes necessary speeds the car is difficult to control; it almost seemed to be planing on the dry surface and required strong, two-handed diligence on the wheel to compensate a split-second at a time. Dynamic stability control is a standard feature but we don't know if it was on.

Back in the stop-and-go world of city driving, the Mini E did everything well. Size helped with no-margin-for-error lane changing and even though I would have liked more pep in the low range I was always in sync with the unpredictable surrounding traffic through work zones, ill-timed traffic lights and rude drivers.

Nobody pointed and cooed, as they did when we rode in an Aptera or later when we actually drove one of the three-wheelers, and maybe that's a good thing: The Mini E looks, in every outward way, just like the internal combustion Mini Cooper (OK, there are no exhaust pipes for the really observant), a significant brand that could stand extending into the green space.

Pop the "gas" cap — located just where the gasoline filler would be — and there is a "no fuel" sticker and an electric socket. Pop the hood and there's what looks like a magic box where you'd expect to see an engine. The box, which contains drivetrain components from AC Propulsion, is sealed and off limits to anyone but a BMW tech. "Open the box and the lease is over," Van Nostrand says.

Car like this — cars that look like cars and not some science project — are probably going to be the Model T of the EV era, appealing to the vast middle class who just need reliable wheels and have nothing to prove other than keeping up a little bit with the Jones.

Van Nostrand is — we're sure he wouldn't be offended by this — "normal" enough to envisage almost anyone owning one of these, though we would expect at a price something closer to the anticipated $40,000 cost of the Chevrolet Volt, a range-extended EV expected next year, than the 50 grand Mitsubishi is asking for the i-MiEV city car when it goes on sale in Japan.

Surely the monthly cost for those of us who can't pay cash will have to come down for the Mini E to be truly successful. In fact, when we told Van Nostrand that $850 a month could probably get him a Lamborghini, he just smiled.

"But who wants a Lamborghini?" he replied.

Photos: John C. Abell/Wired.com and James Van Nostrand. See a slideshow of all test-drive pictures on Flickr.

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