The MINI Electric Tours Fabulous Las Vegas

Everything is larger than life in Las Vegas. This is a city where replicas of iconic landmarks attract more visitors than the originals. This is a city in which renowned illusionists, like David Copperfield, wow the masses with his magic performances. This is a city where rare and exotic cars grace the roads and are a truly common occurrence. To stand out, you’ll need to be in something truly unique, a car that has high emotional appeal.

OneShift Editorial Team

19 May 2020

Enter the MINI Electric. With its striking outward appearance, it matches the glamour of the backdrop that is the Las Vegas strip. It also presents the EV with an opportunity to show off its capabilities. The journey from one traffic light to the next presents an ideal opportunity to utilise its two-stage brake energy recovery, with the strong recuperation mode aggressively decelerating to pump juice back into the battery, and the other mode allowing the car to roll to a gradual stop with less regeneration.

The Red Rock Canyons are just a stone’s throw away from the heart of Las Vegas. Good luck even trying to find shade here. Even if you manage, expect temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius, which is enough thermal energy to negatively impact an inferior battery pack’s ability to hold charge. The MINI’s battery pack remains unaffected in the heat. It has an efficient cooling system that ensures you don’t lose range due to the thermals, barely losing any of its 270 kilometres of range even in the scorching heat. The MINI Connected App allows you to remotely trigger the car’s air conditioning system, which must be a welcomed relief if you’ve taken a long hike in those desert temperatures!

Yet another small detour will bring you to the Hoover Dam. It blocks the river to Lake Mead and supplies Las Vegas with drinking water, whilst making use of 17 turbines to harness the power of the water to generate electricity. However, as a consequence of energy generation, powerful electromagnetic waves are present near the dam, and BMW Group engineers have often tested prototypes of upcoming models through this stretch in a bid to improve the electromagnetic shielding over recent decades. This is why the onboard electronics of the MINI Cooper SE remain distinctly unimpressed during the trip over the dam!