The next electric MINI could be a bike

If a MINI motorbike gets the go-ahead, it’ll be design boss Oliver Heilmer and his team who would have to give it the MINI treatment, so what’s his view on a MINI moped? Auto Express also spoke to him at the Beijing show.

“I actually gave the team the task, ‘Let's do some bikes just in order to understand whether it works’. We tried little motorbikes as far as we can,” said Heilmer. “It's not our expertise and they're doing something where they say, ‘does this work?’ And they say, ‘I don't know. It looks good.’ So you can create something that looks like a MINI.”

While MINI would give any future bike concepts their own look – with round headlights instead of square ones, for example – the technical make-up is likely to mirror models like BMW’s CE 02. The all-electric CE 02 gets up to 15bhp, and is an alternative to a 125cc petrol-powered motorbike.

The BMW will accelerate from 0-31mph (0-50km/h) in three seconds, with a top speed of almost 60mph. A lower-powered model is also available, which can be ridden on an A1 motorcycle licence – this version is limited to 5bhp and doesn’t quite crack 28mph flat out. Range stands at around 60 miles, and the batteries can be replenished from 20 to 80 per cent in under two hours.

Priced from £7,450, we’d expect any future MINI alternative to undercut its BMW brother – possibly by as much as a couple of thousand pounds.

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