Electric

The Cycplus AS2 is a pocket sized inflator that can easily be taken while cycling with a group or alone. It doesn’t have a display and it doesn’t tell you how much battery but it does inflate a tyre within seconds with minimal effort.

I tested it at home first, to get used to its use. You press it against the valve and then you press again and it starts to inflate. It will do most of the tyre’s inflation within seconds but to get a higher pressure will take longer. I used it to inflate the tyre more than once, when changing the tyre.

If you live in towns it’s easy to do things. You walk half an hour to an hour and you’re ready to do something. In contrast, if you live in a village doing the same thing would require a lot of traveling.

Tomorrow, for example, I could travel into Geneva in the morning, to run with a group, and then go home, have lunch. Eventually I could drive back to the same town, but this time for the cinema. That’s two trips to Geneva and back. That’s two hours of driving. If I use an electric car then my carbon footprint is not as big.

Tomorrow I have the opportunity to do another range test with the Fiat 500. I know that if I drive at 120 kilometres per hour the range is about 100 km but if I slow down to 100 kilometres per hour then the range is theoretically doubled. The drive I want to do is about 100 kilometres so if my optimism is well placed then I should make it there and back.

It’s easy to drive a petrol car. You fill up, and 500-600 kilometres later you fill up. With Electric vehicles it is the same in theory. In practice it isn’t that simple. The EV charging market is fragmented and each company has a different app and possibly RFID tag. The result is that you can either be loyal and use just one app or you can have two or more apps on your phone.

Over the years I have enjoyed driving to the shops with a petrol driven scooter for daily shops. I liked that it was small, light and convenient. I only got rid of it, after sixteen years of use because of the cost for a service. Usually it was about 500 but I was quoted 500 CHF, so that’s when I decided to be done with it.

For a while I had no scooter, until I found an Ocean Drive E9 or similar e-scooter. This isn’t a sit down scooter. This is a standing one. Before ownning this one I had tremendous fun with a foot scooter, using it to get to the bus, and train, and then heading to work, and sometimes riding down from Grand Saconnex to Cornavin for fun. It was really enjoyable to use.

Yesterday I had to drive from Nyon to Founex to do a favour for someone. Normally I would have used the car but it was in for a tire change. I was switching from winter to summer tires at last.

On the way to Founex I took farm roads as much as possible because they’re less likely to have cars, and I’m less likely to be in the way of those cars. The ride was easy. I used just one or two bars of power on the way out so I still had plenty of battery left. I then walked around, and then picked up a book about technical writing before riding home.

Decades ago, by now, someone decided that they needed to make something like a scooter that could stand by itself, and that people could ride. they created the segway and for several thousand francs you could buy one. Some people did, but many did not. Several decades later someone else decided “Let’s put the wheels one behind the other like with a foot scooter. From then on the human being on the scooter would balance it.

The more I play with the electric car and the more I feel that it affects how I spend my time. Today I would have written a blog post before going out, but I didn’t. I didn’t write before going out because I knew that the battery would be down to 30 percent by the time I got to my destination, and 30 percent of battery power on a car means 14 hours of charge time. I.e. the earlier I head to charge the car the sooner I can head home to have dinner at a reasonable time.

Yesterday I drove the petrol car for the first time in a while. I did it for two reasons. The first is that I didn’t feel like waiting five hours for the car to charge. Especially since it was cold, and rain was predicted. I also drove the petrol car because I wanted to run the engine and charge the battery, rather than letting it gradually degrade, from lack of use.

On one side of the Channel, you have people like Colin Furze building fun machines that have the fatal flaw of having an internal combustion engine. On the other side of the Channel, you have people like Marc Gyver building an electric car with easily bought components. The video below shows the construction process without talking, and without music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FIznSec7BA

For about 2000 Euros, with bike parts, and the right skills, you can build your own cars. You have four powered bike wheels to power the car, two solar panels on the roof to generate 200W and a charge time of two and a half hours for a range of 20 kilometers and a top speed of 50 km/h. The range is perfect for when you need to do things within a short distance.