proud new owner of an 'i'

Mitsubishi i-MiEV Forum

Help Support Mitsubishi i-MiEV Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

rickmaz

Active member
Joined
Aug 23, 2011
Messages
42
I flew up to Honolulu and finalized my purchase today, and was able to drive the car around for a while. Was so much fun! Now it just needs to go on the inter island barge, and hopefully I'll have it by the end of the week. Not sure how to post a picture of it on this board. the FAQ is kind of vague, perhaps the administrator needs to add the capability to my account? Here's a try at it:

Photos.html
 
Congratulations! Hope you don’t mind a few questions. What model and color did you get? Any options? Do you know how many have been delivered to customers in Hawaii so far? Was the dealer’s original estimate of when your car would arrive fairly accurate? Hope you will share all your ownership experiences here. Thanks!
 
=>bparker: I got the white/blue two tone (which also comes with the blue power cord stripe down the sides). I got the premium package/SE ... basically all of the options possible except the cold weather package. Yes, they only charged me the exact sticker price (which was what I was expecting). I thought the car was quite spunky and quiet. Despite a lot of online complaints about the interior, I thought it looked very nice (certainly nicer than what I currently have in my Honda Element), although I did get a ride in my friend's Leaf, and it's interior is definitely 'luxury' in comparison. I'll try to find out how to post photos for you guys. I was totally blown away by the number of i-cars on Cutter Mitsubishi's lot...probably over 20 of them, and half had 'sold' signs hanging from the rear view mirrors! The salesman told me so far I'm the only one on the "Big Island", and he did have a sale for Molokai as well, all the rest are for Oahu customers so far. I noticed another guy posted a picture of his on the facebook group of this blog, who lives on Oahu.
 
update=> 'i' should go on Saturday's barge, and ready for pickup in Hilo on Monday! yea!
 
Great news! I guess that means we'll have to create an owners section on the forum!!
 
Sounds good admin...btw, how do you post a photo? do you have to upload it to the forum first somewhere? the FAQ seemed unclear. mahalo!
 
There are HTML formatting tags above where you type in the Text. Put the img tag aroud the paste of the Url for the image (hosted elsewhere).
Like this:
MiEV1_0.png

There may be other ways also.
 
RickMaz - Aloha! Nice photo - see you went for the full package and the island-sun appropriate color. Unless it's required in Hawaii that you have a front license plate, I'd be inclined to remove it for both aesthetics and a teeny bit of aerodynamic improvement as well :)
 
Very nice! I don't live on any island so I can't comment on how island appropriate it is :lol: but I can say it looks great! It's always so much different to see a car taken in a photo that isn't all retouched and worried over, but I can definitely say I like the look of the Mitsubishi i from every angle!
 
P.S. I never noticed the strange windshield wiper arms before! I'll have to watch it run, it's hard to believe they wouldn't hit each other.
 
yeah, in Hawaii we have to have front and rear license plates.

I'll post some more pictures soon. True, the windshield wipers are a trip! Apparently the North American version had to add the second wiper ... not sure if it's because the car is a little wider, or just for some kind of safety requirement. The Japanese and European i-mievs only have one wiper.

I've been having fun reading through all the operator's manuals this weekend, which I brought home with me. One thing I learned is that the 12V battery runs most of the accessories (except for air conditioning and heating)...for example: start-up, headlights, power windows, wipers, cabin lights, audio, and seat heaters all run from the 12V battery instead of the Main Drive Battery...so you can keep the lights and wipers on if you're limping home at night in the rain on a low Main Drive Battery charge without affecting your range apparently.

The little key fob remote is interesting: you pull out a small antenna, and can control remote charging timers, or start/stop manual charging, or cool, heat or defrost the car while it's hooked up to its charger.

One minor inconvenience I discovered was that you have to remove the rear seat headrests to fold the rear seats all the way down (which I will do a lot for carrying stuff around.) Doubt if I'll have rear passengers very often.
 
What do you think of the rear visibility in your Mitsubishi i? On the Nissan Leaf, people are complaining that the rear seat headrests block a lot of view out the back. I guess the Leaf has a fairly small rear window and large C pillars. The Mitsubishi iMiev looks to have a large, vertical window so rear visibility should be better...
 
seattler=>visibility seems to be fine even with the headrests in place. I got the premium package and also get the benefit of the rear view camera...which seems to be somewhat of a novelty to me right now, until I get the hang of it.

Yea! My car came in on the morning barge from Honolulu. I had fun driving it around town this morning, and giving rides to my friends, and enjoying the people rubbernecking as I drove by. It worked great in the rain. I finally found out the information that I was most concerned about: to go home from town is about a 4 mile drive up a 1400' climb. It took three "bars" and 16 miles (from miles remaining gauge) to make the trip, so I will always have to leave town with at least that much on the meters. Was able to make the full climb in the 'eco' drive mode, except for my steep driveway...had to shift into 'D' for that. Will be interesting to see how much gets recaptured on the way down the hill when I go back into town this afternoon to get my workout in.

Was pleased to find out that the nav data base included Hilo and the "Big Island", although I certainly don't need GPS to find my way around the island! hehe

The hands free calling worked like a champ...my cell phone was able to easily do a bluetooth sync with the car, and it was cool saying "dial ###-####" and be able to talk to my friend over the stereo speakers and built in mike.

More later, with some new pictures too.
 
Wow - a 1400ft climb - that's serious! I suspect that if you fully charge at home and then try to go down into town that the regen will stop at some point so as not to overcharge the battery (at least, I would hope that it would do this) and you'll actually start wearing down your brakes. Perhaps you might consider charging at home leaving three of the top bars empty, and get a freebie full charge by the time you get into town.

One of my first actions will be to remove the second wiper and take out the rear seat headrests and only put them in on the rare occasions that I will have passengers there.

RickMaz - since you already tried it out in the rain, how much of that window is functionally swept by that second wiper (or did Mitsubishi have to put the darn thing in to meet some obscure regulation)?
 
joeS=> it was interesting...it put one bar and 11 miles back on the meter on the way down the hill...i hardly had to use brakes at all, since the "B" gear really slows the car down.

The whole windscreen is cleared by the two wipers, although they sure luck funky with the bent one interspaced with the main one. It's hard to say what the difference would be...I think on the i-miev's they put the main wiper in the middle instead of over to the driver's side like my new 'i' has .

yeah, same here, i don't really have rear seat passengers often, but I do haul stuff around a lot, so I'll probably leave the rear seats folded down most of the time.

On the second climb up my hill, it took three bars and 12 miles to climb.
 
RickMaz, thanks for the update.

Interesting, as we're at the very beginnings of trying to correlate the anxiety meter (um, miles-remaining meter) with the fuel gauge. Ignoring the fuel gauge and simply looking at the miles remaining, it says you recovered 11 of the 12 (14?) miles you drove. On the other hand, the fuel gauge (what do we call that thing?) says you expended three bars but only recovered one. After you've done it for a month or so I'm sure you'll develop a good feel for the car's energy recovery abilities, but this is quite promising.

Having much better control over regen than the Leaf was a major selling point for me.
 
Since you had time to read the owners manual while waiting for your car to come over to the Big Island maybe you can answer a question about what it says on charging. For some reason Leaf owners try to only charge up to 80%, maybe to make the battery life longer. Do the owners manual say anything about doing a full charge?
 
jjlink=> I couldn't find anything in the manual about how much to charge up the battery or any affects that might have. I doesn't seem to have an option, other than doing a full charge. It does say that you can stop the charge partially at any time without harm. It also says not to "top off" an almost full battery, as this can affect long term capacity. Not sure if this is true, but I read somewhere that the battery is programmed to only charge to 92% for a "full" charge.

Despite the article that quoted Mitsubishi saying that quick charging will not affect battery life, the manual states that quick charging will shorten the battery life if done too often.

It says to completely use the battery down to two "bars" and then a full charge once every three months to keep the indicators reading accurately if the capacity changes.

----------

Been having fun! Yesterday I visited a friend in Ainaloa..about a 50 mile round trip, that goes on the highway (55 mph limit), and I arrived with only having used three bars. It made it home easily with four bars still left on the gauge...(includes the 1400' climb on the way home). One thing that is nice...the "go home" feature on the nav system gives a miles remaining readout...so you can feel very comfortable knowing you have 33 mile range, but only 4 miles to go for example. I did not use air conditioning, since I'm still exploring the capabilities of the EV. It appears to have plenty of range for 98% of my needs!

Driving at night is very nice. The headlights are precisely aimed and bright enough, and the high beams are really great! I was happy to discover this with my aging eyes!

One thing I discovered that was quite interesting...After charging my car all the way, and heading down the 1400' hill into town...I discovered that if the battery is full, you don't really get any regen braking effects to speak of, and end up using friction brakes instead. So it would be helpful for me to discover a way to leave one bar not charged so that the strong regen braking effect could be used without having to waste brakes. Also, one other thing that is interesting...when applying brakes, as you first start to depress the brake pedal the first thing that happens is that the "eco meter" drops into full regen until you reach a very slow speed...I'm not sure if that means that friction brakes are not being used in the first inch of brake pedal use, or if it's a combo effect.

I've been getting a lot of looks and people asking how the car is working for me. The first question is always "how far can it go on a charge?" Then lots of folks are asking if there is any savings by buying electricity instead of gas. Luckily here on the Big Island HELCO offers an 18cent/KwH off peak rate for EV charging (compared to our current 42cent/KwH rate). Gas right now is about $4.25/gal on the Big Island. As I've mentioned I'm putting in an extra 8 265W solar panels for a household total of 32 panels, which should come close to covering all my needs.

Still waiting for my electrician to get the permits to install the 220V Eaton charger that's taking up space in my carport. So far overnight charging on 110V has been sufficient for the useage I've been doing. Will be nice to have a faster charging capability when it's in place though.

I'm really enjoying the quiet, smooth ride and many choices for playing music...which all work great...USB memory fob playing mp3s, CD's, music copied to the hard drive, and radio, and even bluetooth from my phone!
 
Back
Top