Still alive

Zoe has been working great. I have well over 10.000 km on the clock now and the only issue I've had is the "Check ELECTRIC System" error which occasionally pops up on the display, but apparently it's much less serious than it sounds and nothing to do with the high voltage system. I'll mention in the first service next year, but that's all. Also funny are some of the translations from french, for example pre-heat is pre-soak. Well, the weather has been quite a soak this fall. The 40+ kWh battery is amazing and I've actually pretty much stopped looking at the range meter. It's more like with an ICE car where you just know or notice that it's time to fill up instead of continously monitoring the state of charge.

The converted Citroën Xsara is also working as usual. Had to have it's yearly inspection done and still nothing to fix on it. The brakes could be better, but they still get the job done in city driving. I did notice that the ethanol heater I have in the car wasn't putting out much heat, but turned out I just had to bleed the "cooling" system. Luckily it's really easy to do and the heat was back right away.

EV meet-up and time for a Zoe

First of all, it's alive! kWsaki was revived today for an EV meet-up at the Pori Energia offices. We have SuomiAreena summer happening in Pori now, so there's a lot of people around. This makes a good time to have a little get together. The bike is still working great, although the non-EV bits would seem to need a bit of attention. Brakes don't feel great and there's something weird about the steering.

In any case, the bike is alive, currently with 21 cells for about 70 volts of electric power. I tested the bike and the top speed was around 90 km/h with this voltage. I've had it up to 29 cells or 97 volts, which resulted in about 130 km/h top speed. That's about 4.5 km/h per cell or 1.3 km/h per volt.

We had a lot of good discussions, also with Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Kai Mykkänen, who visited us and talked about what the government is doing to further the EV cause.

In other news, the Leaf is gone. That's right, we decided to invest in a little bigger battery. Quite a lot bigger actually, so we went ahead and got us a Renault Zoe with the  new 41 kWh battery.

I have to say the car is really great and range anxiety is gone. Completely. The bigger battery means I can manage my journeys with ease and the ubiquitous Type 2 charging points together with the 22 kW on-board charger of the Zoe means charging is possible almost everywhere, quite often also completely free of charge. So, once again, good times!