I appreciate your sentiment, but this would be a daily commute car for us. I do not know your anticipated usage, but charging daily or every other day to 100% (as opposed to charging 100% once in say a week or 10 days) may not be the best policy, at least in my opinion. You might disagree, which is OK, given that this is a very personal decision. Your situation is different from say ours, and therefore the lower range and the more occurrences of 100% charging may be less of a handicap for you. My response was more to the observation that there did not seem to be much enthusiasm for the MINI SE. If it was not for the range, my wife would have been a near certain buyer, now she is more in the "wait and see" mode. And I hypothesize that there are many more people in this situation. Which actually might be to your (@insightman ) advantage. You seem to be a fairly committed buyer and there might be less competition to your being one of the first to acquire it.
When I was still commuting, the MINI Cooper SE's range would have worked great for my 20-mile round trip. I'll agree that charging to 100% could possibly shorten the battery life. However, the engineers if this car will expect people to charge to 100% because the battery is small, so they will take the appropriate precautions to protect the battery. Also, Honda recommends fully charging the battery in our Clarity PHEV because cell-balancing takes place only when the battery is fully charged. I'm not familiar with the i3 and don't know if it has the option of restricting the charge to a lower percentage automatically. However, I can't see myself deciding to limit the charge. How could I safely predict that I wouldn't need 100% of the car's range the next day? I don't want to be making the call, "Honey, can you wrestle the generator into the Clarity and come rescue me? I protected the battery with a partial charge, but I ran out of juice on Huron River Drive, a half-mile outside of Dexter."
