TWIKE 560 Adventures

today, we have a short and long stage. the first stage to tumkur technical college with only 70kms is going to be a breeze for us in the TWIKE.

nevertheless, jc and i get up early and set off as the first team at about 7am.

the road is beautiful and we settle into the european relaxing routine of driving and looking at the sights going by.

we’re so much ahead of the schedule that we decide to leave the motorway and drive through tumkur > which turns out to be a brilliant idea – we find a monkey shrine and the TWIKE definitely makes a good appearance here.

shortly after that we arrive at the college. no charging points have been set up yet, so we just take our extension cord and use the closest plug available. re-charging time will be very short, since 70kms has just been 2.9kWh > roughly one hour from a standard small wall socket.

we then start waiting for the other team members to arrive. jc relaxes and answers some questions regarding the TWIKE, wilst i monopolize the college’s internet uplink (@1.8mb/s) to upload the team’s photos to my server in switzerland. it’s always better to be safe than sorry!

after some time the others arrive and we see the pittyful installations that have been prepared for us to charge. 1(!!!) 4mm2 phase has been brought out about 150m to a football field. the electrician told us “no problem, no problem” but @217V we didn’t want to take any chances.

we then proceeded to the principals office for breakfast and official reception before the student interaction and fair.

since the other team members didn’t charge the cars on the football field as planned (although they had set up “the largest asian electic car fair”) and stayed at the main college building, only the TWIKE was there – see how this looked like:

even there, charging was a problem and after the second time the fuse blew, desaster struck: the twingo didn’t charge anymore.

paul took charge of the situation and dismantled the charger. he found the internal fuses had gone off. he started to solder on some wiring in order to check if the fault was there – unfortunately not… the charger was indeed broken.

walti with the twingo had to head back to bangalore, whilst we with the TWIKE headed onwards. with some head start, the others would catch up when they had finished eating lunch with the principal.

we headed off towards chickmagulur, knowing full well, that our charge would not be sufficient for the distance. we decided that we wanted to charge in arasikere, along the 206 state road.

here, it got really difficult and indian mentality made things very, very unpleasant. no-one wanted to take any responsibility regarding us connecting the plug to any socket. it took us over an hour to finally get a plug and start charging. finally it took us so long that the other wave team members arrived at the restaurant we were charging and we had some food together.

then we set out to reach chickmagulur. we left 206 and found ourselves on what i believe is the worst road i’ve ever driven on with a TWIKE. the road looked like it had had chicken pox! it was impossible to go over 10kph.

and the distance to chickmagulur was 38kms!!

finally, shaken, very tired and happy the TWIKE survived the ordeal, we made it to our hotel shortly before midnight.

NEVER AGAIN!