Quote Originally Posted by steveinjapan View Post
Here is another kei-car electric that apparently went into limited production. I saw one on display a few years ago. The Mitsu kei car is the only 5-passenger kei that is much different from all the others around and has a large underfloor area for batteries where the motor would normally be. As a gasoline car it was only sold in Japan, and from what I see on the streets, maybe was not all that popular because of weird appearance.... but cool IMHO!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i-MiEV
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/10/26/2...-drive-review/
Hi Steveinjapan

Yes this is the great IMIEV in fact this cool looking car almost convinced me to buy it as they are now on sale here in the UK and have been for a year or so.

I so nearly bought one but when I looked at the cost vs. the specs I decided I could build a better faster EV for a lot less cash. (reforming petrol head here!)

I will be watching the second hand EV market closely as I have heard rumours that EV's won’t hold any resale value at all because of the need to replace the battery pack completely after purchasing a second hand EV.

If true I could be picking up perfect upgradable EV shells for next to nothing in a few years :-)

Maybe the IMIEV was limited production but here in the UK I think they have sold plenty in fact I have just found this http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html#nabble-td4664393 "IMIEV sold out in the UK" So very popular here in the UK in fact it was its looks that nearly sold it to me, and I would love to get my hands on one but I don’t have 24K to spare :-(

Also there seems to be a slight conspiracy going on in the insurance world it seems that the only insurers willing to insure EV's are classic car or specialist insurers, I discovered this just a couple of weeks ago when I came to insure mine, almost all of the standard insurance companies gave the same response "sorry our underwriters have pulled out of insuring EV's" on further digging we got one of them to admit that "due to the large number of claims in London over the last year we are no longer insuring EV's"

Still Adrian Flux gave me a deal I could not refuse :-)

Graham