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 […]
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? 🙂 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! 🙁 Autumn can be very nice around where I live…but doesn’t have to 🙂 Can’t wait for some nice days to – maybe – have a last […]