Geneva Motor Show – 10 years of visiting this event with an eye on electric mobility. Will we finally have the electric breakthrough? [Spoiler alert: Sadly, no] There are some signs, though. The image above is Rimac’s concept_one car, a 800kW, 1000+bhp all-electric supercar. Interestingly it is the #1 image hit when you search for Geneva’s 86th Motor Show. No breakthrough, but still a marked change. (#2 is Bugatti’s €1m+ Chiron) My focus, as every year, is: What are mainstream brands doing with regards to electric mobility? I haven’t written about the GVA Salon since 2012. This year, Twitter and […]
New motor burn-in trip
After TW560’s recent motor replacement Seb, a long-time reader of emissionless.ch, wished me luck with my next 191k. Since we hadn’t met for quite a while, I answered his comment by proposing a trip to perform a thorough burn-in for TW560’s new electric motor… and whilst doing so we could meet for some good food and wine. Just two weeks later, I had a two-day series of meetings in and around Geneva coming up – a perfect moment for such a burn-in, since Seb lives just around 80km from Geneva. With another meeting in Bern to take care of, everything […]
Fondue in Malans – a two-day trip, take 2
What I like about driving an extremely rare vehicle is the close-knit community it creates. Since there isn’t a wide network of commercially motivated help available, it’s important to know other drivers one can reach out to in case of questions or problems…or just to share good memories! The TWIKEklub traditionally organizes 4 events during winter (which has, thanks to global warming, been bringing us less snow every year for the past 10 years). Cold weather is ideal for traditional Swiss cheese-based dishes such as Fondue and Raclette. JC and I take part at most of the events – last […]
Getting ready for #geneva #gvamotorshow
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 […]
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 […]