EVcast 310 - A great show with Michael Craner, Michael Thwaite, Mike Boxwell and held together by Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield.
]]>I’m re-jigging a few projects, but in the meantime, please do watch last week’s TWiE - which was a great episode. You can see the full selection of episodes at www.thisweekinenergy.tv.
In the meantime, please feel free to watch the episode below.
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I’m working on my EV, a 1985 VW CityStromer. I’m hoping to get it up and running again by Easter. Right now, she’s off the road with a bit of Motor Bother.
Over the Winter Tigger has not been getting a nice time of it. I haven’t been able to store her indoors, and the weather has been really wet. As a consequence, some of the damp from outside has got inside. So I’ve resorted to heating the car with a little 200W heater. Not exactly what you’d call ideal, but it’ll do for now.
However, I’m hoping that the new year (Happy New Year, by the way) will bring good things for the VW EV I own. I’ve already got a garage full of spare parts, including a tow-bar, a rear bumper, a front bumper and even a quad-light grille. Oh yeah. I’m talking serious fun. It’s also occurred to me that the VW logo is about the right size to hinge up and reveal a 16 A charging inlet. I’ll think about that one some more, I think. (I’d also thought about casting a plastic VW grille badge in see-thru plastic and then hiding LED lights behind it so that it lit up while charging. We’ll have to see…
But I digress. This isn’t the purpose of my post. The purpose of my post is that I’ve started to work on a little coding. Now, I’ve never coded before really, and my Wife is a professional programmer. She took one look at my code this morning and re-wrote a whole lot of it. Finally, it’s starting to make sense. So I thought I’d share it with the world.
Take a look, and please let me know what you think! (No-one has de-bugged yet, and it’s a work-in-progress)
At the moment, the code controls the car’s ‘boot up’ sequence. I want to introduce safety measures on Tigger the Ev so that she doesn’t just start up as soon as the ignition is on. (With kids on the way, I figured that would be kind of dangerous… I’ve also had a silly moment when I accidentally drove away with the car still plugged in. This code will, hopefully, eliminate that! )
The file is attached at the end of this post. It’s written for Arduino. If you can code, let me know what you think!
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Today, I was among one of the lucky people to be present in Birmingham’s Centenary square to witness the launch of the Mitsubishi iMiev in the UK. Okay, so Mitsubishi had a few cars on the road before then - but they were strictly test/publicity vehicles. Today, twenty-five lucky people drove home in one.
Sadly for me, I don’t live close enough to the CABLED test area so I wasn’t eligible to take part. But believe me, I certainly wanted to take part! (Hopefully I can find an iMiev of my own very soon)
While at the launch I was able to get some really nice photos of the event, including some fast-continuous ones. I even got to have a quick spin around the block in Mike Boxwell’s iMiev. (Yes he got one!)
Thanks so much to Mitsubishi UK and CABLED for making such a great event. It was pitched just right. It wasn’t full of pomp and ceremony. It wasn’t high-brow. It was a bunch of folks, congregating together with just the right amount of purpose to illustrate that the twenty-five electric cars leaving that day were in fact the start of something big, something incredible. There was free coffee and pastries and circus performers and face-painters kept the children happy.
And there was a huge cross-section of community there from the well-known to the unknown. Celebrity car journalist Quentin Willson rubbed shoulders with young, enthusiastic families ready to take their new ride home for the first time. Retired couples and grown up families congregated around some cars, whilst teenagers drooled over others. There really was a real slice of society represented.
And that’s something cool, because before now electric vehicles were viewed as being a complete niche vehicle; something which either the very rich or the very desperate drove. Today I didn’t get that impression. Today, there were normal people, driving what looked like a very normal car. Were it not for the writing on each and every car proclaiming the car’s green credentials it’d not even get a second look.
So now we have the iMiev to sit squarely between the GWiz’s laughable dimensions, speed and notorious spec and the drool-worthy pant-wetting specs of the Tesla. Okay, so the iMiev isn’t cheap yet (participants are forking out £350+ a month for the privaledge to take part in this first round of iMiev roll-outs), but it is expected to come down in price within a few years. Enough, in fact, that it’ll be within most folk’s price range.
While you may not be a fan of the iMiev styling (I am) you can rest assured that this won’t be the last EV from Mitsubishi, nor will it be the last EV to hit the UK streets. In fact, many more cars are set to hit Birmingham and Coventry streets in coming weeks as the CABLED scheme rolls out more marques. This is the turning point we’ve all be waiting for. This is the turning point that makes my job a joy and a whole-lot easier. This is a day I will remember for many years to come.
If you see one of these cute vehicles give them a wave. And if you are overtaken by one don’t feel ashamed; the performance of these puppies is certainly a remedy for many a milk-float blues. The iMiev is just getting it’s own back.
If you’d like to hear the EVcast which followed the event, in which I was lucky enough to be joined by Mitsubishi UK MD Lance Bradley as well as Neil Butcher from the Arup Vehicle Design Group, Mike Boxwell and Robert Llewellyn (all new iMiev owners) please head over to the EVcast homepage.
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To donate to Nathan’s healthcare fund, please Help him out. ]]>
Don’t forget to give the EVcast team feedback by emailing us at podcast at evcast.com. I’m keen to think what you all think of the opening sequence! I’ve been working hard to get the new show style up and running today. Sadly, down to bandwidth limitations, we were unable to do video, but we’ll try again for a future show.
Enjoy!
]]>It was a beautiful day and we had a great time filiming the little short film about Aminorjourney.com, NikkiDrives, and Tigger the EV!
Head over to PositiveTv to see the show, or watch it below. (We’re the second half!)
If you’ve just discovered the site through PositiveTV’s show, welcome! Feel free to have a little look around and don’t forget to watch the latest NikkiDrives!
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In the digital world it’s a case of make a fool of yourself, or have others make a fool of you, so we’ve plumped for the latter and I’ve agreed to make a fool of myself.
Behold what happens when car reviews go wrong.
Of course, if you want to follow the real NikkiDrives series, (without the embarrasing out-takes) you can do that at www.nikkidrives.tv.
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One such company was Chrysler, who not that long ago, went to the White House to ask for a total of $12.5 billion in federal aid to help this dinosaur of the golden age of motoring move into the 21st century with more fuel efficient, home-grown models to woo the American buyer and save the economy. And how just did Chrysler propose to throw off the shackles of eighty-four years of gas-guzzling excess? Why, with three new models, all powered by electricity. And a few hybrid models to boot, making Chrysler (the only major American auto company not to make a hybrid at the moment) part of the hybrid club.
It all looked great. In January at the Detroit Motor show, Chrysler boasted that it would have 500,000 battery powered vehicles on the road by 2013, including vans, trucks and sports-cars. Could the company who makes some of the biggest, most polluting cars actually turn into a green company, with fluffy bunnies on the fender and grass growing from the tailpipe? It seemed a possibility. Then Chrysler went into chapter 11. They needed money fast, or a buyer. When Chrysler’s good assets were sold to Italian car company FIAT in June this year, it all started to fall into place. It looked like Fiat would pick up Chrysler’s bold EV programme and help the ailing star shine bright again with an exciting range of new EVs. The truth though, would be far more cruel.
Fiat, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Why cancel the ENVI programe?
Chrysler’s new owner, Fiat, took one look at the books and decided that something had to give. Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne and his team of analysts found the Chrysler outfit in a much worse state than they’d first thought. In an attempt to keep both companies afloat, Marchionne and his board of directors started the meticulous cull of anything they didn’t like. Anything which they thought would cost them too much money.
First to go was the ENVI devision - a group set up by Chrysler to spearhead their new eco car development. Among the proposed new cars was the Dodge Circuit, a two-seater, pulse-rising sports car. But on Friday last week, Fiat Chrysler announced that the team of specialist engineers who headed the ENVI devision would be disbanded and absorbed into a more ‘traditional structure’ of corporate auto management. In other words, dumbed down.
Worse still, Fiat’s CEO cited to Reuters on Friday that by 2014 there be at most, 1 or 2 percent of Chrysler’s vehicles running on electricity - a figure much smaller than the optimistic 500,000 estimate of earlier this year. Why did Marchionne feel that there would be less than 60,000 EVs on the road? Batteries.
Yes, Batteries are the big bad wolf again. Marchionne stated that
“Until the (battery) storage gets resolved, I think electric vehicles are going to struggle”.
Right. Batteries. We all know just how bad they are. I mean, electric cars can’t possibly go long distances can they? I mean, there’s no way that Simon Hackett, the geeky MD of Australian ISP Internode, could have possibly driven 313 miles in a production EV with no modifications on a single charge is there? The interview I carried out with Simon last week on the Evcast must have been a complete figment of my imagination.
Before I die of sarcasm, perhaps Marchionne could read performance figures and range of a Tesla. Or some of the less sporty EVs out there. But arguing that battery tech isn’t here when trips like Simon’s make the news just isn’t right. It isn’t clever. It’s nothing more than a poor excuse.
It wasn’t even as if the batteries that Chrysler were planning on using weren’t up to the task; They were planning on using A123 batteries, which are wildly recognised as the best lithium batteries available. They even power some of the fastest EVs in the world. When combined with a good battery management system, they’re also capable of incredible range.
While Fiat haven’t said they’re killing the EV per-say, they certainly seem to be throttling back on the whole thing. In fact, that figure of 60,000 vehicles looks like it’ll be just about enough to satisfy any CARB regulations. Isn’t that a coincidence?
In the meantime, FIAT have gone down in my expectations. And they’ve become the first company to jump off the life-raft that is electric vehicles to swim to the shore on their own. But it’s a long way to the shore.
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