EVcast #201: Obama Makes National Headlines with Old EV Announcement

Thanks Rick & John. You know I had my doubts about gas cars emitting more EMF than EVs but I thought it sounded halarious. Perhaps Bo can walk around with a little EMF meter when he gets his Tesla and tell us the difference between that and a ICE car.

And Bo - don't hold your breath about Forbes publishing your rhetoric. Like many journalists, sometimes posting the truth would get in the way of a good story.

Interesting the gas version of the iMiev is for sale in the Czech republic. I'd smuggle one down here and convert if to electric if 1: I was rich, and 2: the steering wheel was on the correct side. Hehe

And Nikki - I'm already in the North/South position awaiting those Ions. Nothing's happened yet but I'll give it another minute.

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OK so I just had to know what Nikki was doing with EV's over there in the UK.  Check  this out.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aminorjourney/1001240958/

http://www.batteryvehiclesociety.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=18

And people says EVs are not luxury vehicles.

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Thanks John as usual!

EVs need good wipers in the UK.  They are probably not called wipers, they are probably called something like topsquiggie. 

Memo to Nikki or EVCheczclub.  Please help Bo and Ryan with a whats available in Europe show element.  My curiousity and spelling are killing me.

Fred

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Gav,

You can read more about EM fields at the UN's WHO site at http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/. They also had a section on the exposure levels to various sources of EM fields at http://www.who.int/peh-emf/about/WhatisEMF/en/index3.html. Stereos and clothes irons came in the highest BTW. Be advised that V/M means volts per meter (or metre to you Kiwis) for measuring electric fields and µT or mT refers to microteslas, or milliteslas repectively, used for measuring magnetic fields.

Distance from the source is also critical to how much exposure you get to EM fields. This has to do with a radio principle we were taught in ham radio school called the inverse square law which states that the power density of an electromagnetic wave is inverse to the square of the distance from the source. So if you double your distance to the source you will be exposed to 1/4 of the power density at the new location. So consider this with the cell phone example (or electric shave in the UN WHO report) to put in perspective. We expose ourselves to EM fields far larger than you could get from a car, ICE or EV notwithstanding, and do not suffer from it.

I hope this gives you more food for thought. Personally I'm not worried about EM fields in ICE cars. Detroit and Japan have spent decades working to reduce the EM emissions from the ignition coil and spark plug wiring for the not so surprising reason that they would generate interference to the AM portion of your car radio. Even then the EM fields are blocked by the engine compartment.

Cheers,

Rick, from the oil capitol of the world Houston, TX.

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Nikki,

I was looking in vain to see if you have two phase power available in homes in the UK. Because we here in the US use 120 volt AC we use a 240 volt two phase system for electric stoves, ovens and clothes driers as these things need more power that 120 volt single phase can supply. Is this the case in the UK as well? If this is so I'd be curious to know if you have appliances for that voltage. It would make charging EV's with larger battery packs go pretty quickly.

Cheers,

Rick, from the oil capitol of the world. Houston, TX.

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Hi Guys and Gals!

Wow! I got a message on my Flickr page to come on over and answer some questions, so here I am!

John - Firstly, my EV projects/photos

The EVs you've all seen on my Flickr page are ones I've driven quite some time ago. The QPod has to be the scariest electric vehicle I've ever driven. It had handlebars like a bike, with a bike throttle. But you brake like a car. I drove it while visiting a fellow EV enthusiast in the highlands of Scotland. I guess EV enthusiasts live everywhere!

My City El was driven for about 18 months before I had to sell her for something a bit... err... bigger. My friend John still has one (although it's off the road at present)

My current vehicle is Velma the PHEV. (I'm getting about 90 mpg at the moment out of her).

Gav -

Perhaps we'll have to figure out how to wire up the sheep first. And then we'll need to get them to move enough... and we'll have a nice AC current! :)

Rod - 

I'd be delighted to help Bo and Ryan with some EV info from the UK. Obviously the most popular EVs here at the moment are the G-Wiz/Reva, although you can't normally buy them if you live out of London - a real frustration for me as they require anyone out of London to ship them back every 500 miles or so for their service or the waranty is void. Sadly the G-Wiz has about 50 mile range so... a bit tough to do when I'm 120 miles out of London!

There's also the Nice Car Company - I'm sure some of you heard about the financial problems they had in the fall. I prefer the Nice MEGA City to the G-Wiz and actually did a review of it when I was Editor of Plugged In - a magazine the BVS used to produce (I'm no longer a member of the BVS though - I won't go into it here).

Nice Car Company are also making a few other vehicles including a couple of converted ICE cars - a Fiat 500 and a Fiat Dobolo minivan. I've never driven these though.

Of course, you can also buy second-hand Berlingo EVs (a car-based van made between 2001 and 2005...) They go on ebay from anything from £1,000 to £4,000. Sadly you can't buy replacement batteries very easily, so when they die... they're a pain to fix.

We also have our fair share of small companies/dealers who make/convert EVs. There's nothing yet that is really impressive. Which is why I converted my Prius... There's a company in the UK who will convert a Prius for £12,000+ to a plug in hybrid using a similar kit ot he Hymotion - but I converted mine for £2,000 plus a bit of hard work. I couldn't have afforded the former!

I'll not go into too many more details here, but if someone wants more info I can provide on both EVs in Europe and PHEVs here!

Rick -

We have single phase supplies in most houses. Our mains is at 240VAC (Or actually, since we standardized with Europe some time ago, 230V +-10%.)

A standard UK plug can draw 13A at 230V, or 2.9/3KW.  Most kitchen appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators run at 13A. You can't run a washing machine and drier from the same extension lead as I've discovered - but you can run them from a double wall socket at the same time: The Ring Main (household power circuits) can quite happily cope with it.

Stoves and electric showers are also single phase, but run at anything from 15A to 30A! They have to be permanenty wired in with apropriate saftey trips/interrupts.

The blue camping style plug/socket I mentioned a few episodes back http://www.flickr.com/photos/aminorjourney/3322850378/) are available in waterproof versions. We have two which we had put on the outside of our house when we brought it. They allow for 16A of power at 230V.

You can even get a 30A installed, if your home circuits can take it without going over the standard 100A total current overload limit that most homes have here in the electricity meter box. A 30A single phase supply would allow for nearly 7KW of charging!

If you're lucky enough to live on a farm or in a remote area you may even have what we call 'three-phase' supplied to an outbuilding. three-phase will support much higher currents but generally don't get delivered to domestic buildings.

Evan Tuer, a Citroen Berlingo owner (and other EV owner/builder) in Scotland has a 63A quick charger for his Berlingo! I'm not sure how he gets the power though! :)

http://www.tuer.co.uk/index.php?slab=my-evs

I guess that would charge a Tesla pretty quickly too...

I'll stop there. I have to go and unplug Velma from the mains as she's nearly finished charging...

Nikki.

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Nikki,
    Thanks for the reply.  You clearly are very knowledgable about EVs.

    Re: 500 mile service interval for the G-Wiz.  If this is true, it would be very disappointing.  The lack of need for oil changes every 5000 miles is often cited as a big advantage of EVs over ICE cars.  If the batteries need service every  500 miles, that would be a problem.

   Looking on the web, a G-Wiz dealer called "GoingGreen" calls for a 500 mile first service interval for the G-Wiz, and 4000 miles after that.  So that is a little better.

   The G-Wiz User's guide suggest that "equalization" of the batteries is performed automatically every 500 miles.  So I don't know why this service is needed.

Later
John C. Briggs

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John - The problem I think a lot of people have with the G-Wiz is that Goingreen, the UK supplier of this car, will void the waranty if you get the car serviced elsewhere or fail to show up for servicing.

Still disappointing - the idea of having to have a GWiz plus a car which could tow it back to London every 4,000 miles for a service is really off-putting.I'd like to see service centers spread outside the greater london area, but as yet it's not happened. You can understand why Goingreen won't support outside London - they're still a small company.

On a personal level I'm no fan of the GWiz. I drove one a few years back and really didn't like the handling. It felt like a big toy and I've driven far more 'car like' EVs which drove like real cars. Ah well. Roll on some more EVs!

For my money, the best EVs in the UK at the moment are either the self-converted ones or the second-hand EVs which are are on the market, like the Berlingo electriques.

For conversions, a guy who lives a mile or so down the road from me has converted an east-german Trabant to electric. It goes faster with electric power than it did on the old two-stroke engine. It maxes out now at about 70mph :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33949838@N04/ - if you want more on this great fun car! :)

Nikki.

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Nikki:

Seeing those lead acid cars like g-wiz, nice, and our zap, I think we would be a lot further ahead if NiMH were available for pluggins. 

Re your Toyota prius conversion, I looked at your pictures.   Is there a place where you describe the whole process.  Are you buying a prius replacement battery and the toyota plug option.  You probably have the plug charge 30 mph switch in your version of a prius because it is a Euro version.  

Did you have to reprogram the car?  Did you wire together the original battery and the new battery.

Thanks for the cool pictures.

Fred

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No video yet, but here are the iMiEV pictures on EVnut.com:

http://evnut.com/iMiEV.html

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Darell,
   Thanks for the info.  A very nice report.

    I was really struck by the 16KWH battery pack.  This is the same size as the Chevy Volt.  Chevy only plans on getting a 40 mile range out of that pack.  So it makes me wonder how much range the iMIEV will really have.

    Still, cool car.  I can definitely see this meeting my needs of commuting to Boston.
Later
John C. Briggs

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Nikki - Just a correction on the availability of 3 phase. In my experience it is in the street everywhere - you are correct in saying it isn't in a lot of houses but they can install it (especially if you get Economy 7 heating) and I have seen 100A 3P used in some houses and flats. Even if you have single-phase, often you will find that some of your street are on a different phase too. I've seen power cuts where only 1/3 of the street was down!

By the way, the "camping style plug" is called an IEC 60309, colloquially referred to as a "commando plug" because the common manufacturer MK gave its versions that name.

Now that NICE has been resurected, do you know if they are actually going to ship that Fiat 500 coversion? I sat in it at last years' motorshow and thought it would sell like hot cakes, but given that it is not made by Axiam (the French guys that make the Mega and now own NICE), I wondered if they would continue to sell it. Pity - I was hoping by now there would be several around London but it wasn't to be (yet).

Just finished reading your PHEV story by the way - very well done, just shows there is no excuse not to.

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KiwiEV> Gav, I'm not sure what do you mean? I've not listened to this show yet. What I said in some previous chat during the show, is that the ICE version (right hand drive)  of this "kei car" "Mitsubishi i" appeared at some int. markets, notably in Asia and the UK since ~2005. You might base your next conversion on similar RHD import..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0si6djA7ED0&feature=related

??And we are definately left hand drive market since WWII (before that it was british style RHD), I'm not aware of any LHD sales in EU..

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