PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Mi­ni has tak­en its first step in­to the elec­tric ve­hi­cle space in T&T with the launch of its Mi­ni Elec­tric last Fri­day.

The com­pa­ny’s Coun­try Brand Man­ag­er Ce­lestee DaBreo ex­plained that de­mand for an elec­tric Mi­ni had been high since the Gov­ern­ment in the bud­get last year an­nounced tax ex­emp­tions on elec­tric ve­hi­cles with an ad­di­tion­al surge since May when Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced that the waiv­er al­so ap­plied to hy­brids.

“It’s been amaz­ing, most of our cars have got­ten pre-booked, we have got­ten calls from the time the ex­emp­tions would have been is­sued where elec­tric and hy­brid cars would have giv­en full ex­emp­tions. It’s re­al­ly been field­ing calls, try­ing to get peo­ple in to see the mod­els and then pre-book­ing so be­fore cars have even land­ed they’ve been sold,” said DaBreo at the me­dia launch of the ve­hi­cle at the Mi­ni’s Show­room in Port- of-Spain.

The first few units, priced at $355,000, all come ful­ly loaded but DaBreo ex­plained in time more vari­a­tions will be in­tro­duced that will be less cost­ly.

“We know that even­tu­al­ly we’re gonna prob­a­bly scale down maybe just shy of 300,000 be­cause you have less op­tions. So you may not want high end speak­ers or a sun­roof, we are hop­ing to touch the gen­er­al mar­ket, so any­where from mid to high range. The awe­some thing about these cars is that they are so cus­tomis­able that you can build a rel­a­tive­ly af­ford­able all the way to some­thing that has 18-19-20 inch rims,” said DaBreo who added Mi­ni brand has ac­knowl­edged that elec­tric cars are the fu­ture of the in­dus­try and wish to en­sure these cars are avail­able for every­one.

“We re­al­ly want to touch every­body and most im­por­tant­ly we want to push sus­tain­abil­i­ty and we want to push the fact that elec­tric is not go­ing away. It’s com­ing our way and we need to re­al­ly be ready and ful­ly aware about em­brac­ing it,” said DaBreo.

Mi­ni’s Gen­er­al Man­ag­er for the Caribbean Tiffany Mar­tin ex­plained the brand has in­ten­tions to go ful­ly elec­tric by the end of the decade.

“By 2030 Mi­ni will be com­plete­ly elec­tric so the brand will be a ful­ly elec­tric brand you’ll find from 2024 on­wards there’s plen­ty more Mi­ni mod­els that will be an­nounced,” said Mar­tin.

Mi­ni’s hy­brid ve­hi­cle was al­so show­cased dur­ing the launch, as the com­pa­ny al­so pro­mot­ed its “Big Love” cam­paign which is geared to­wards large busi­ness­es be­ing at the fore­front of pos­i­tive so­cial change around the world.