Hi, my name is Anthony, 31 yrs old, I live & work in France and have also fallen in love with EVs since about 3 – 4 years ago. I have worked with Tesla Motors in France as a sales rep/mechanic/car demonstrator ( you have to be pretty flexible…) but it is not my main job (for now….)

Anyway, stumbled on to your website whilst looking for info on the Prius. I happen to drive one myself and am part of a french association http://www.bientotelectrique.com (if you’re any good at french you might get the gist of it…), which installs the enginer kit on Priuses, as well as trying to promote EV conversion (but France is SO SLOW and SO BUREAUCRATIC, its hard going)… We are currently working on an Aygo conversion. We are NOT a company, just a couple of guys working in someone’s garage with little or no budget…

I thought it might be nice to share experiences and views, it’s always nice to meet a fellow believer I think…

Couldn’t find your mail details anywhere on the site, so thought I’d throw this message in a bottle on your comment page.

Look forward to talking / writing / mailing with you.

Regards

Anthony

cheers,
Nathan Abbott

In fact, you may find that the best way to start is by drawing a time-line of what you want to happen. Show all the trigger events such as the key operations and pedal sensors. Then, write the code with the time-line as a reference.

But, this looks like the beginning of a BLAST project! I’m going to follow this one.

MDF

But rust-wise, there’s hardly any. I’ve seen four year old cars with more rust than this puppy!

Nikki.

on a more general comment I spend a lot of time reading abut EV’s and am becoming quite despondant about the auto industry.. if you look carefully you will see that every time an EV is shown anyplace, apart from TESLA its usually a little car… if they are showing anything that runs on HYDROGEN its always a big family size car… you and I know why.. you need a big car to hide those 9000PSI tanks.. but people being what people are.. they will gravitate towards the bigger car as being ‘real’? and the EV’s being toy cars…

what do you think?

BTW despite your ‘no’ on the 2010 PRIUS… we my husband and I traded our model II Prius for the 2010 model? because among other things there is more leg room in the front and as he is quite tall he appreciates the extra leg room.

So There..

Cheers
Peter

Wilfried

The answer to this, that would chill BMW to the bone is for every single one of the few MINI drivers in the UK to get media coverage about their experience. Why, because I bet you will find (pending further sabotage by BMW) the drivers will communicate how cool driving an electric car is and how they want to keep their vehicles too! Hope you can arrange an interview of a different BMW ED driver every couple of weeks.

Great Show, love your format. Ben. ps- that is absolute rubbish about ev’s not being for women in the UK. Sounds a bit like fear mongering. "Women, don’t have the ability to estimate their mileage," and "Our delicate and helpless Linda, could get stranded out on the dangerous, dark roads at night, unlike our capable, virile son Thomas who, when he drives his ev is much smarter than any woman, plus knows how to take care of himself!!" Rubbish! As our commentator in the media, help us see the smoke and mirrors for what it is. (opps, got carried away.) If you let me write again, I’ll try to make it shorter.

pss.. you are brilliant, I wish I knew how and could afford to build my own ev.

A MUCH better route would have been to get the ferry from Newcastle to Kristiansand in Norway, and drive down to CPH from there, but I think the ferry route is discontinued.

So my advice would be to only do this route if you can blag a Prius out of someone – I’ve got a couple of contacts I’ll hit up at Toyota for you, long shot, but worth a try. I doubt you’ll et a Tesla, but I did see one with UK plates in Copenhagen the other week, so you never know…Last point, the bridges that join up the main islands of Denmark get VERY windy, so a light EV in December might be a problem if the weather is fierce. Oh, and the toll on some of them is 20 quid+, each way!

Don’t want to discourage, but the secret to Danish happiness is low expectations

Wilfried

1. Keep you theme to 980px. On many screens your right column will be chopped off and you’ll loose any hope of ad visibility over there.
2. Place a 300×250 adsense ad unit at the top right of your posts. PPC ads must be above the fold or below the post, IMHO. 300×250 is an ideal size because top advertisers commonly run banner campaigns with that size and their clicks pay more.
3. Place a 160×600 in the left column just below the Nikki drives video.
4. Place the third ad unit (a 300×250) below the post or put a leaderboard above your banner. On you site I think I’d go with the leaderboard because you’ll get top auto advertisers.

The color choice in your adsense ads is just fine the way it is, no need for changes. I’d also leave the ad units set to text/image and let google decide which type to serve up.

Spend more time on Twitter and definitely setup the plugins Twitter Tools and TweetMeMe. Spend more time following other bigger green bloggers. Twitter is best as a networking tools not really a direct traffic generation tool, although you’ll get some there. You see other bloggers want good content to blog on and you’re creating great stuff. They will blog on you and you’ll get traffic from their websites.

Also consider alternate revenue streams. Most bloggers don’t make it all from the blog but use it as a tool to expand into other areas like books, ebooks, etc.

Good luck… feel free to remove my comment from public view or leave it. I hope it helps! Good luck with the adoption process too… it is totally worth the time money and effort.

-Michael

This might be a good example where individual cell monitoring of some kind could have stopped the charging process. During charging, the main concern is "overcharging" a cell, usually detected by monitoring the cell’s voltage. Sometimes, charging "too fast" is detscted by monitoring cell (or cell bank, or pack) temperature.

However, in this case, with the apparent "shorting", WHAT could have been monitored to detect a "problem" and shut down the charging BEFORE serious damage occured?

As a software entrepreneur, I have had limited interaction with the media and always ended up disappointed with the amount of errors they would make. They basically made up facts supporting whatever thesis they happen to be pushing.

Finally, I understood that today’s journalist is underpaid, overworked and has no time for in depth quality investigations. Therefore, I’ve taken the habit of preparing PDFs explaining my products, explain the fundamental of the problem they are trying to solve. They also like having a list of expert users (like yourself) they can contact for additional quotes.

We E.V enthusiasts have to prepare such documents and make them widely available to the press so they can stop making the same mistakes. For now Wikipedia & PlugInAmerica’s web site are the only resource that try to give an overview of the EV world.

What do you think?

On a side note, I like to the work you have been doing with the EVcast! Yours has been a very welcomed addition to the podcast, and one I’m always eager to hear. Plus, I learned English when I was just a toddler by using a BBC books-and-cassettes course, so your unmistakable accent brings me back to those (bygone) years, hehe.

Have a warm hug from tropical Venezuela. Bye…

I am a bit sceptical about the MG1 and MG2 viability at 70 mph stealth. The design of the PSD would force these parts outside of there design parameters and it is widely speculated that this could cause a breakdown in the lubrication system of the motor generators. Only caveat would be if they were actuall in warp-stealth not stealth. Warp-stealth allows the gas engine to idle burning very little gas, but provides torque compensation to keep MG1 and MG2 within thier design specifications.

-Dan <11011011>

I agree. I owned a lithium Ion powered City El, using similar batteries to the Ev’ie (just smaller capacity). The BMS system I used backed off the power immediately if there were battery issues, as I wired in a control cable pair to the car’s throttle potentiometer.

I would hope that any long term commercial EV would work hard to keep the batteries in check without the owner/driver doing anything unusual.

Nikki.

I suspect that the car you drove had one or more bad cells. If the BMS knows it’s job, it would cut down the power available once the voltage of any one of the cells dropped below a preset value. If the rest of the pack was good, you could still be seeing a "whole pack" voltage close to maximum. A friend who uses Thunder Sky batteries in a conversion periodically checks the voltage of each cell individually under a high (30 Amp +) load to detect bad cells. This ought to be on the maintenance schedule of a Li Ion powered car.

Our adoption social worker is awesome. She really is making the process as painless as possible. This weekend is the deadline for writing my personal story though, so lots of typing ahead!

Nikki.

Good luck on the adoption stuff. It’s arduous but so worth it. My wife and I adopted our little girl (3 years old now) and life has never been the same… for the better of course

Luckily Kate doesn’t slow me down. She’s my muse and is a wonderful lady!

I agree – The Smart should be out sooner. It’s only sensible! Hopefully I’ve scored a test drive for NikkiDrives. Watch this space!

Nikki.

Great work as usual. Keep it up. Don’t let your partner slow you down. Americans can be jealous folk. Re: the Smart article 20012 ha? What are they waiting for? Why do you have to wait another 2-3 years. That is ridiculous!!!! Tell Daimler to remove a few seat warmers from the piggish Mercedes and to finish the ffing EV Smart.

Well, stick around for part two – That’s going to be about DIY converted EVs!

Thanks very much for alerting us to this.

One small comment: I think they are Ewert Energy Systems not Ewart.

All the best,

Andrew

I’ll join you on a test drive of the Smart ED!

Same goes for the iMiEV. When is that scheduled for?

BTW – I am due to test drive the C1 ev’ie week after next. I’ll let you know how it goes. I asked them to "put their best foot forward" given the experience you had!

On another note (as a Prius owner) I am totally excited about the Ewert Energy demo. That is almost unbelievable. I look forward to more technical and performance data emerging. I am going to find out whether we can get it in the UK.

All the best

Andrew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ASwJJaE2bU

I can totally tell that you’ve got the passion needed to make this a full time gig, and your content as quite good considering it’s squeezed into the late nights and weekends.

You’re a little bit early for the EV scene… you are on the cutting edge, well before the mainstream.. but I have good reason to believe that petrol prices will rise sharply again and world events make make gas cars less affordable than ever and give people incentive.

If you want to make this your day job, I think you can do it IF you’re really focused on what kind of content you create and how you monetize it – and have the stamina to keep going, going, going.

I’d be glad to help with some ideas or strategies. E-mail me if you’re interested,

You might like to check your facts. Nikki received an email from the company indicating that the company's own engineers had examined the vehicle and not found a fault. If the experts on the car couldn't find a fault, how should Nikki be expected to? Further, details on the car's gearing or the source for individual components has little importance when you are pushing a car off a roundabout. Lastly, please drop the hate and leave your sexism at the door.

It's not at all fair to say, as Paul does above, that ICE cars break down on a weekly basis. Modern combustion engine cars are very, very reliable, with mean time between failures of several thousands of hours. If EVs are to be taken seriously, they *must* achieve similar reliability.

In terms of reliability, what fixed gear it was in or what the torque output of the motor was is neither here nor there. Do we give the car handicap points as a result of this information?

I own a G-Wiz and a Prius. I'm desperate for someone to come out with a "real", fully electric car. So far all the news seems to be full of excuses instead of advances.

What is toxic about an honest view of the car (as it performed on the day)?
It didn't work, it is expensive and I wouldn't feel safe driving it.

I'm sorry you feel my reviewing skills aren't up to scratch. But at the end of the day, any car which is open for a test-drive needs to be in good condition. Poor test-drives lead to less sales.

Any vehicle, whatever it's powered by, needs to be good on the day of a test-drive. And yes, I don't deal with much in the way of technical jargon because most people out there are more interested in how a vehicle drives and feels than what's under the hood.

I'd also like to point out that as someone who has worked on her own cars for many years, both petrol based, electric and plug in hybrid, I'm not all that technically literate. Perhaps you should read my profile and about some of the EVs and PHEVs I've worked on.

Essentially at the end of the day the vehicle overheated. It should not have done. I've since chatted to the ECC who have agreed to let me back to do another test drive at a future date – One which I hope to video and one which I hope will help equalise the negative review I gave it.

The car's concept is wonderful. The price is a bit high. The engineering couldn't be reviewed on the day because it failed. That failure, when given to anyone wanting to test-drive a car, would be one which made them walk away and never try the car again.

Please go and troll elsewhere.

You should show this review to any other EV company PRIOR to asking for a test drive and see what reaction you get.

If you could comprehend the spec sheet before parking your but in it, you would've known what to expect. I don't read ANYWHERE in your review any reference to what gearing it's running (final drive + what gear it's in), the EV motors power output of torque rating or even the source of these components … just a lot of negative attitude about a vehicle that obviously had a fault. (as if ICE cars don't break down on a weekly basis)

Your diagnostic skills have proved to be absolutely useless (are trying to blame the battery meter or the batteries themselves?) What is the point in having a bitchfest about a fault? You aren't Clarkson for Christ sake!

For an EV “nut” you're an EV companies worst nightmare… a big mouth technically illiterate female who is so stupid she doesn't know how stupid she really is. Go and start your own Ev company if you think you can do better!