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.
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.
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.
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.