Usually, when someone starts talking to me about things like electric cars aren’t clean, because the electricity is dirty and the like, my answer usually is: That is a fascinating point we should definitely have an extended dialogue about one evening … and you’re buying the wine. But what if I can’t have this dialogue and someone with media coverage like the International Auto Salon Geneva pumps out information like above? The GREENEST car in Switzerland: a DIESEL with a 3 litre consumption @ 79g/km CO2? Seriously? How can such a decision be made for an ICE car anyway? ICE […]
TDAF2016: A new TWIKE adventure
JC and I have started planning our newest TWIKE adventure. It will be a relaxed 9-10 day trip in June 2016 – taking us up to the highest points in Europe and back down to the sea. Can you guess where we’re heading? More to follow soon.
A quick visit to Vienna – TW560 travels to Vienna on its own!
Finally, I get to go to Vienna again! With my new job I’m travelling considerably less than before and have no direct responsibility for Austria anymore. An upcoming series of official functions in Vienna, however, have me fully booked for 2 days and I thought to myself hmm… how about extending the trip to visit some friends and stay with my family and work out of the Vienna office? Everyone I got in touch with was very exited at the prospect and my agenda for my week in Vienna filled up in no time. My company has a global policy […]
Every 191000 km…you’d better have a spare ready!
Last week I was driving at 90 km/h on the A1 motorway on my way from and to a next meeting as suddenly TW560 started losing speed. No noise, no grinding, no error messages – just no acceleration. Eventually, after changing the controller display to show raw inverter messages the inverter showed me a F06 error and rebooted gracefully just to show the same error when attempting to accelerate again. As TWIKEs in general roll very well, I didn’t have to leave the right lane immediately. After 3 reboots, I knew that something was definitely wrong. A few hundred metres […]
Battieres: Current status & how to keep them healthy
Batteries: the most important part of an electric vehicle and the most expensive part, too! EV drivers always obsess about remaining capacity (…especially the ones that use their EV for more than just their daily commute) and which external factors can contribute to capacity loss…and what can be done to preserve capacity as much as possible. When speaking to a non-ev-driver, there is much confusion about what exactly capacity is. Car manufacturers make things even more confusing with much electronic nannying and many abstraction layers. Chemical energy storage is a vast field and I could start a full blog covering […]
Season’s greetings & Welcome 2016!
Season’s greetings to everyone & thank you for reading this blog in 2015! emissionless.ch/emissionslos.ch has seen its visitor numbers double in 2015 – I’m humbled by the sheer amounts of people reading my musings and following my adventures! 2015 has been a very good year for TW560: Many one-day / multiple-day trips, an epic pan-European adventure and very few technical issues. 2015 was also a good year for electric mobility: it truly entered mainstream media and the collective mind – not only because of the VW-emissions scandal. 8 years ago, with a TWIKE and a Renault Kangoo Electri’Cité everyone thought […]
A Christmas present from TW560
December 23, I finish work and drive to my Canadian friend’s place to have some pre-christmas drinks. My wife has already arrived. We have snacks and many, many drinks. After midnight, we both get into TW560 and boot DFC30 (DreiFels Controller 3.0) and want to drive home. Within one second, I know something is wrong… The battery warning light (which, under normal circumstances, never, ever, is on for more than a fraction of a second) glows and nothing happens. A few reboots later, my feeling tells me we’re going to go nowhere tonight. As most of the readers of this […]