EVs are just superior

Since no car shop seemed to have the basic skills to paint plastic panels... I decided to do it on my own and learned a lot about paint, priming and how to do all this without a spray gun i.e order cans. I was lucky to also find an online shop that could get me 4 cans of the paint needed to match my car's body. Below is how I did it... I waited 2 days for it to cure then installed the panel. No docs were available so I had to improvise but pretty straightforward...

The battery capacity hasn't dimished a bit. So long for the perception Li-Ion will degrade after a significant mileage. On my side I still drive up and down canyon, explore the backcountry and drive long distance with the added satisfaction of instant torque, quietness and no vibration. Sadly a couple of months ago my driver side door was dinged by a city bus. After some research I found out the panel of the door is the easiest thing to change. In their teutonic wisdom BMW decided on making the i3 a lego car... simple to maintain (like ZERO maintenance) and easy to repair with simple plastic panels. It has more in common with a Humvee and its replaceable metal panels riveted together than a complex molded metal Lexus where a simple ding costs a fortune to repair. So far what would be a 2k job on another car is: - $300 driver side door plastic panel ordered OEM from the dealer. - 6 cans of primer at $6 bucks each - 4 cans of body paint matching my cars color ordered from...

Big bad review of Model X. WTF! As I get close to 45k miles... zero problem, zero issues, flawless machine that gets me from A to B inside something expressed as a suitable vehicle for the 21st century, not the 20th, I cannot fail to not notice the war taking place against EVs. I don't even  have FAST DC, just level 2. I don't have access to Tesla's fast chargers and need to spend a cool 4 hrs charging up... but one adapts, and ultimately enjoys being able to charge up from anything like a 110v wall outlet plug to a shopping mall to their place of work. Indeed as the market reach of BEVs (pure electrics, not the poseurs half baked like plugins or "hybrids" which companies like GM want us to mix up with crossovers between SUVs and cars) gets close to the 1% mark, the fossil fuel lobby realizes the dreaded deadly danger they represent in ANY significant quantities. BEVs privileges are scaled down dramatically just as Elon Musk mentions the stupidity of doing it for ...

So there is it... 42k after 18 months. The battery still going strong and no degradation of performance. The best car I ever had let me do something else today... From 100% charge a 57 mile drive from the coast to beyond Julian, CA at 4800 ft, and then back to Ramona 27 miles away, with 10% to spare. This was due to the Santa Isabel chargers offline. I was at 12 % and decided to try my luck. Even that long after owning the car I have to admit it was quite the experience. The car went from 17.5% of charge at the top of the hill at 4800 ft in Harrison Park to 10% in Ramona at roughly 1400 ft. Yes I have NO FAST DC. And NO this is NOT a REX version. I hate gasoline and everything that goes with this noxious and toxic substance akin to heroin for the economy.

The battery is as strong as ever and my average is about 120-130 miles a day. There is exactly 0 issues with the car. And the new rear tires I installed a few months back which were the only item needed in more than a year will look like they will last more than the 25k of the factory ones. If there are any doubters about how advanced BMW i3's battery technology is here is proof in the pudding... a car driven relentlessly and very hard and the battery pack shows absolutely no sign of charging fatigue. I think this is where the i3 shines and is set apart.

And so the endless and pleasurable driving of the EV continues and I blew past the 30k mark before I even knew it. Several things that I learned: 1) One will adapt to the charging times and include them in any activity. 2) Switching to a lower carbon footprint means some rewarding changes 3) The battery capacity has not changed one bit... which makes me hopeful for the next 100k or so The i3 is definitely the best car I ever owned and embodies a disruption greater than Tesla's offerings, because of its tires and usage of space inside as well as the minimalistic consoles, all direct consequences of a lack of a large ICE engine in the front as well as the mechanical simplicity of a skateboard model where the flat batteries and the electric engine are at the bottom. Countless articles have been written on EVs but I doubt anyone has used one to such a degree as I did during a full year, especially considering I only have Level 2 charging possible on my model.

So 1 year of ownership and 28400 miles done! This means almost 80 miles a day on average. Given my average speed is 40 mph that means more than 700 hrs spent driving the car. About 6 MW of energy used. The fact is an electric vehicle makes you drive more and enjoy it ever more compared to a gasoline dirty, noisy and polluting contraption. And my i3 still smells like new! I have learned so many things and among them that BEVs are far superior to fossil fuel crappy cars. As ICE vehicle are inferior by the very design. Many more years of superior driving experience to come! For the financial part... I paid maybe $50 in electricity costs for the year vs. 4-5k in gas I would have paid assuming 80-100 fillups. On top of the 7.5k federal tax credit I got that means I was way positive cash flow this year as if I was paid to have the car and drove it for free. Not bad.

It's the VALUE you get - Buffet

So that moment came... after 27k miles I will change the tires as I noticed the thread being very worn out. So I went online and find the same type and got them shipped in a day... $90 each. That makes the BMW i3 a car with decently priced tires, considering how specialized they are. This is pretty much the ONLY required maintenance on the car. As far as the battery last and so far there hasn't been any reduction in range that I noticed. I can still do 120 miles from Murrieta to Santa Monica on a single charge.

I now average 700 miles or so per week commuting 60 miles each way and some mountain driving on week-ends, courtesy of all those chargepoint stations. When commuting to Santa Monica I was averaging 1000 miles a week so having an EV and that freedom to go anywhere on a whim really makes you drive a lot. I am sometimes jealous of not having a Fast DC port but the average cost of a level 2 station is a few K vs. 100-200 grands for a Fast DC outlet. There is no noticeable reduction in battery capacity and I often top it off. Kudos to the metrolink chargers in Anaheim that pump close to 6.7 kw. Strangely enough the paid chargers nearby only average 5.6. I read about the Toyota Mirai and definitely like the fact fuel cell technology seems operational and below a 7 figures price tag for the first time in hundreds of years but the infrastructure is the Achile's heel of it: 1) $1 million per hydrogen fueling station. A grand total of 10 in SoCal now 2) Hard to image how someone can refuel a...

This is the reason why I have an electric car. At the end of the day we either behave like amoeba or we are lucid enough to make sacrifices in our lifestyle to avert a catastrophe: This graph shows 97% of all vertebraes are now human beings and their livestock or pets. The rest of the biomass is pretty much negligible in size. Should we destroy more habitats to look for oil and sustain the unsustainable? already we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet and any destruction upon the monoculture that sustains us will have devastating effects. Mismanagement of the Planet can be reverted with small steps.

So I went to Julian once again and this time the trip was even more enjoyable. The car does best on downhill where there is no need to use the breaks... it just regenerates. But uphill and on curves its true characteristics and the low center of gravity due to the battery pack make it an awesome rocket that carves the road like it would be on rails. Passing other motorists is incredibly easy and reminds me of riding a high power motorcycle like a Ducati I used to own a few years back. This is especially important as along the whole of the 79 there are only 2 spots where one can legally pass and both are less then 1/2 mile in length so an ultra fast speedup followed by a quick slow down is necessary to stay within the range of the dotted line and with a good sight of the opposing traffic. The smoothness of the power curve is, well, just that: Linear and swift. The mountains is where a high performance EV really shows how much electrics are mechanically and performance wise far superior ...

Yesterday decided to visit someone in the high desert, and also test my battery and range after crossing 21k and racking up about 100 miles a day since then now. I changed work and no longer need to commute 203 miles a day between Murrieta and Santa Monica. Nonetheless the range is as solid as ever. Up the Cajon pass did cost me 1/3 of the battery but then it was all cruising along. And when I fully charged there I could make it all the way back to Murrieta 97 miles away through ups and downs across the 15 and 215. Nightime the temp dipped to 27 and the steering became slightly noisy (grease needed?) and the tires are sensitive to it given their pressure will dip by 5-7 PSI under such conditions which needed me to add some pressure. I passed the 22k mark on the way down. At this rythm I expect > 40k by the first year I will have the car. Long distance commuting and long range travel within 300 miles are definitely the best qualities of a pure electric vehicle.

Thanks for Ghandi for this upmostly relevant quote. We obviously need it in what is aptly described as a right wing nut reaction to something now far superior and threatening to the established kleptocracy of black shit from the ground consuming poisonous beasts: The establishment goes nuts against the Tesla Here's my response to the criticism of the Tesla: Fuck you Wall Street Journal! You just don't get how gasoline cars are already dead, do you? All this now shows is how far ahead electric cars are now, and as the performance and capabilities increase every year the BEVs can now see all those preposterous and obsolete monsters in their rear view mirror. Film, meet the CCD, tape, meet the CD, and gasoline car, meet the BEV. As I crossed 18500 miles in my i3, far superior mechanically than any car within quite a large radius I believe, I can savor my low footprint, my utmost disdain for wars in foreign countries done in the name of that black shit from the ground we absolutely...

The more I drive my BEV the more I realize the pervasive and noxious nature of ICE cars. They now seem inferior in every way. A BEV is about 3-5 times more energy efficient per unit energy used to move its body around. To testify to that here's a look at my energy consumption thanks to ChargePoint. We can safely add 100 % as I am also getting my energy from other sources i.e home, blink and the free charging in Santa Monica, so 3 MWh seems a fair bet. That means 3,000,000 X 3600 = 10.8 Billion Watts (or Joules). This as I crossed 17k since March so in about 5 months. That is about 5.8-6 kWh per mile.  Gasoline has about 44.4 MJ/Kg. So I consumed 10.8e9 / 44.4e6 = 243 kg of equivalent gasoline. That would be 536 lb of gasoline or 90 galons. But there is a problem: only 15% of that energy in gasoline above gets actually converted to useful work in an ICE engine subjected to the Carnot cycle, whereas BEV use more than 90% of the energy in the battery quite effectively. Let's assum...

I finally heard a small rythmic noise on one of the back tires the other day and sure enough it was a small screw. It was in the part of the tire with the most rubber so I was hoping no damage was done, which was even confirmed after I pulled out the piece, but sadly a tiny portion made it inside and I was faced with a small leak, maybe 1 PSI a day. The tire pressure indicator is definitely precise to indicate that. What am I to do? well strangely enough the i3 is not stuck with those expensive run flat tires that are irremediably damaged after a small puncture, at the convenience of another 50-100 miles (don't get me wrong that may be useful as those punctures tend to happen in the rain and the middle of the night per the quantum theory based Murphy's law), so I can repair it myself using an inexpensive kit which I did. It does hold up to now. At this point there is absolutely NOT a single justification to ever own a gasoline cat again... in fact their looks alone with that na...

My conversion to gasoline free is now complete. So much that I decided to only make a new entry at more significant milestones, like now which is also 20,000 km, or halfway across the planet. The serenity of complete engine silence and lack of vibration seems to have conditioned me to realize the utter violence and assault on the senses of the gasoline vehicles outside, especially the diesel monsters. 3500 more miles and it barely was any achievement. I still average 200 miles a day and the battery is as effective as ever, with 115 miles of range every morning and about 108-110 when I drive back, due to the altitude difference between Murrieta and Santa Monica. The car is also very utilitarian lately, with a coffee table and other large items being transported. My work is moving to a new location to I can grab a whole lot of free stuff there offered to employees and bring back all the way to the inland empire. In Santa Monica it seems the 3hr limit at the free charging stations seem to...

Almost 3 months and now 10k. The novelty is gone in a way as the car is doing all my previous gasoline car was enabling me to do. The bonus is of course very minuscule energy expenses, as chargepoint is free and the City of Santa Monica provides me with free charging and free parking, as well as a few dealers along the way. In fact it would be very hard for me to go back to a gasoline car, ever. Last week a couple of service actions were done, one of them being upgrading my charging unit so it can now go to 7.4 kW, and the dealer loaned me a 328i. It felt way different and I missed the better cruise control as well as single pedal driving of the electric, not to mention overall better performance due to full torque at 0 rpm and no gearbox.

Friday I got to fully recharge the car and somehow noticed my range was indicated as 86 miles on the way back. I also parked it closer to the 10. The car loves stop and go traffic... it makes regenerative breaking very effective and extends the range, while the speed it taken care for me by the cruise control, so all I have is to steer and relax. As I say my range stay in the 80s I entered the first station after the dreaded no man's land between Corona and Murrieta, covering 40 miles, and noticed the behavior became similar to what I experience going in. I previously calculated the effects of the altitude change and determined going to work gives me an extra 1 kWh of boost, while going back would mean losing that. In theory that means only a loss of 5-6 miles of range, but I always was scared to not recharge before Corona and then make that trek across a vast expanse of 40 miles devoid of any level 2 salvation... Until now... after 2 months I felt I knew the car enough to try it. ...

Generally mountain driving and bev seem mutually exclusive. Based on my calculations in an earlier post going all the way to my property in the mountains, at a cool 5000 ft up, would skim 5 kWh just to get up there. And then you add the horizontal distance: 70 miles. But I haven't been there in 3 months so the need to check that my humble shed and its contents weren't vendalized become pressing. And as this 3 days weekend unfolded I finally decided to be foolish enough to try the feat. First I checked what stations were available and found out a grand total of 6. 5 in Ramona and 1 in Santa Isabel. Probably the blink network so I grabbed a code at www.blinkcode.com just to be ready. Initially I aimed for Santa Isabel as it was the closest but a lookup on blink's site showed nada there so I redirected my trajectory to go to Ramona first. The drive was similar to when I went to San Diego but then I followed the 78 starting at Escondido. I was happily surprised to arrive in Ram...