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 […]
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: 15°, 0°, 22°, -2° & 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 🙂 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 […]