From June 2009 to June 2010 I had the privilege of Driving an All Electric MIMI E for a year, it was a great experience, and got me hooked on electric cars. I've since moved on to other electric cars which I will blog about.

Monday, July 6, 2009

to drive or not to dirve electric

This weekend my fiancee and I drove to an area we are thinking about moving to, it is only 35 miles away but while there we planned to drive around and get a feel for the area. So the big question was which car to drive, I really wanted to drive the MINI E and knew we could make the 70 miles there and back, but how much would we be just driving around to look at houses and stores? In the end we decided we better take the Z3. I measured our driving anyway and we got back home after driving 105 miles. I think we could we have done this trip in the MINI E, but range anxiety would have made me head back sooner then planned. This brings up one of the biggest problems with an electric car, now days, while it is great at driving between known points, if your going to drive extra, and dont know how much that will be, your range anxiety can be really strong. I hope public charging stations, or range extended EV's will solve this problem, I also think a intelligent GPS navigation system that would work with the car to tell you when to head home would be great.

I also have been having problems with my home electric since the wall charger was installed (even though Im not using it yet). At times the lights will flicker in and out, at first this happened only rarely and only in the bedroom, but over this weekend it became almost non-stop, with about half the lights in the house flikering in and out, including the fridge. Being a holiday weekend it was hard to contact anyone, but the elcetrician I've been working with was kind enough to talk to me, even though he was in the middle of a party, and while he couldnt come right out, made some good sugestions one being it might be every other switch in the fuss box, which seemed to be correct, and to contact the electric company to see if there was a problem in the area.
I called up the electric company and reported a partial outage, and had a service man over within a couple hours, only everything was working fine by the time he got there, he ran a load test but wasnt able to find anything wrong. He did see my MINI E and commented that it was a nice car, and when I told him it was electric was very interested, showed it off to him and he was very impressed.
Well having the charging cable installed this week, and will have them double check the connections in the fuss box, but sofar the flickering lights seems to be a mystery.

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