Fun at Tesla’s store in Zurich

Being the organizer/sponsor of events for my company I’m really happy – where possible – to include my personal interests. In the past, organizing events including electric cars was a tedious or even impossible task. Now, the time is – finally – ripe! Currently, no other EV-brand has both the coolness and media exposure as Tesla – After just a few calls everything was ready to host the event at Tesla’s Zurich store. This time my company facilitated an IT-security event on game-changing security technology together with our local telco, Swisscom and a well-known IT-security vendor for C-suite decision makers […]

TW560: Party supplies vehicle!

Who said a TWIKE was unable to carry lots of goods? TWIKEs are exceptionally well adapted to carrying loads! To prove this, I used TW560 to buy some supplies for a (smaller) office party we have every first Thursday of every month. Let’s see how this went, shall we? ๐Ÿ™‚ Pat (another long-time reader of emissionless.ch), came with me to my local cash’n’carry outlet to buy some supplies in bulk. After placing about half of what we eventually bought on the trolley, Pat was getting increasingly incredulous that we would be able to get everything into my TWIKE. At double […]

Display troubles…

Just after arriving back from my one-day-trip to Feldkirch, TW560’s display started acting strange, showing confusing information. My TWIKE was working fine overall, so it wasn’t any serious problem. I suspected this to be the same problem I experienced during my 2011 trip to India, where challenging roads made a daughter board from TW560’s new controller from Dreifels a.k.a. DFC 3.0, come loose Let’s dive in and fix this problem, shall we? All that needs to be done is push the daughter board firmly back onto its contacts. (newer boards are held back by cable ties). Where is the cable […]

ODT: Vorarlberg & Lake Constance

Contrary to my prediction in my last post, we’ve been having extremely nice weather late into the year – a week-end of sun and acceptable temperatures for driving without the canopy was coming up. Claudia, a close friend and long-time reader of my blog, had asked me to join me on a trip for some time now: 1+1= another awesome one-day-trip with TW560. Since there are many places we could head to, I asked Claudia if she had any preference: Appenzell and the upper Rhine valley. (Good choice!) We agreed to meet early morning in Winterthur. This left me with […]

Back to normality

After my three-day trip across 6 passes and 3 countries and seeing so many beautiful places I’m back to my every-day commute. Currently, my commute is less fun – Swiss authorities have decided that a perfectly acceptable stretch of road has to be torn up and renewed…adding 25 minutes of daily traffic jam to my commute. Just imagine: The forecasted completion date for 15km of motorway surface renewal is …. beginning of 2019! ๐Ÿ™ Autumn can be very nice around where I live…but doesn’t have to ๐Ÿ™‚ Can’t wait for some nice days to – maybe – have a last […]

Day 3/3: Switzerland. Just. Perfect.

Welcome back to the last day of a 3-day EV-tour across 6 passes and 3 countries. In the last entry we made it to the duty-free haven of Livigno. The elderly hotel owner who had gladly let us charge over night had called some of her family over to see us off personally. Livigno is located in a high-lying valley with one road leading to Italy and two to Switzerland. After checking road conditions we decided against the Bernina pass and (much narrower and notoriously closed at a minutes’ notice) Forcola di Livigno road and head towards the Passo di […]

Day2/3: 15ยฐ, 0ยฐ, 22ยฐ, -2ยฐ & No.4, Take II

Welcome back! After driving to the highest point in Europe yesterday, our trip today will take us above 2200m three times, one of the passes will be the famous Passo di Stelvio at 2758m, just a few meters below Europe’s highest point reachable by road…All this using electric energy only ๐Ÿ™‚ This entry will be longer than usual – many very nice experiences to write about. It rained all night. Sleeping right beneath a skylight helped me be acutely aware of this. Whilst lying awake, I visualize a brilliant day without rain and us having a very nice day. The […]

Day1 – Our Objective: Drive to the highest point in Europe

I start early at 6am – Saturday mornings are usually not a problem traffic-wise, except for Saturdays when school vacations start (this Saturday…) – as I wrote in my last post, preparations for this trip were changed at a very late stage and I’m just compensating for traffic by leaving slightly earlier than initially planned. The best way to make some distance – because I’ve literally driven every single possible road to Austria and want to get to somewhere I don’t know yet quickly – is to drive on the motorway. An interesting trade-off is when you want to get […]

3-Day Tour: To the highest Point in Europe

A new multiple-day TWIKE-adventure – A new TWIKE team – A new goal to reach! After visiting the three northern-most points of the Mediterranean and crossing Europe’s fourth-highest pass by TWIKE last year, I wondered: where is the highest point in Europe i could drive to without needing a 4×4 or special permits? Thanks to Wikipedia, getting the answer is not very difficult ๐Ÿ™‚ June this year I added a new TWIKE adventure to my “upcoming activities” widget: Drive to the highest point in Europe reachable by an official, tarmacked road without special permits. Theoretically, reaching this point and getting […]

One-Day-Trip: Swiss Jura

One-day trips are one of the nicest forms of TWIKE travel. After our last trip together, visiting the Italian part of Switzerland – Nico and i had always been wanting to take TW560 on another spin somewhere nice, together. As always, life goes by really quickly and Nico’s high-powered career with lots of international travel and myself being also quite busy didn’t help either. Finally, In January 2015 we fixed a date for our second adventure after a 3 year break… in July 2015! Already with some ev-travel experience himself, I asked Nico in which general direction he wanted to […]