Who are the biggest electric car liars - the BBC, or Tesla Motors? • The Register

The Beeb coverage which has Robert Llewellyn (the actor who played Kryten, also well-known for revealing his intimate personal details on Twitter) and Tesla so wound up is this effort last week from BBC business journo Brian Milligan. Milligan decided to drive from London to Edinburgh in a battery-powered car, to see how long it took and how easy it was to do.

The car obtained by Milligan was a "Mini E", a Mini with its normal propulsion (engine, gearbox etc) replaced by a comparatively cheap, low-performance electric drive train. You can't buy a Mini-E; forty of them were made by BMW and leased to users (for £330 per month including insurance and maintenance) in a beta-test project of the sort common in the alternative-vehicle-tech world.

To cut a long story short, Milligan finally nursed his 'leccycar into Edinburgh on Friday four days after setting out, having achieved average speed (over the time spent driving and charging) of six mph. The journey had been far from simple, as public charging points remain thin on the ground in old Blighty - and are sometimes so far apart that the Mini-E struggled to reach the next one. The trip was also uncomfortable at times: Milligan was compelled to turn off his heater in sub-zero temperatures in order to eke the last few miles out of his battery.