It's back. But this time it's all cider'd up!

Hello there! Welcome back. I told you I'd do it and here it is, the Boogaloo is back but on other topics!

For those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter (which I'm pretty sure will be all of you) you'll know that every Sunday evening for the last 9 months I've been doing "Sunday Cider" where I've been trying a different cider every week. Not because I know anything about cider, in fact for the exact opposite reason - I knew nothing about the stuff and wanted to find out about it. Unfortunately after 9 months you start to forget what you've already drank and what you haven't so I decided to take a few people's advice and collect all of them in one place here on the old blog. In hind sight I wish I had given them scores or star ratings or something, just to make it a bit more interesting but hay-ho, too late now. There's also a few where I didn't seem to record an opinion on them. Sorry. I suppose I can do them again and be a bit more verbose ;o)

It's Gone!

Last Thursday I finally passed the iOn on to the next person at work to have it and I have to say I was a little bit sad to see it go. I had become quite attached the the little "bean on wheels". So I'm back in the old fossil burner with it's complicated gears, clutch and smelly exhaust. I've only stalled it twelve or so times so far and I still can't get out of the habit of pressing the break in when I start it up. But there are several questions left to answer (several of which have been asked by my far too clever friend Gilli who has a proper "geet posh and that" website here: http://www.gillianharrison.moonfruit.com/ ) which I will now attempt to answer:

Tortoise Light

Yes that is what it says.

A real tortoise. Not a tortoise light.

Had a bit of scare in the iOn tonight. After my long awaited return to domestic football (or Heads and Vols with the lads as everyone else would call it) I gave Chris a lift home and the car decided that this would be a good opportunity to go wrong. While heading down the A1 at 70 a little light in the shape of a tortoise lit up on the dashboard and the car started to slow down drastically. Pulling into the hard shoulder I did what any good technician would do and turned the car off and back on again. It didn't work. Chris meanwhile was scrabbling through the instructions. I tried another "reboot" and it put itself right. I have no idea what went wrong but it is now officially on a warning.

Driving, Maths, Psychological Musings and Very Long Blog Post Titles.

Sorry I've not posted here for a while but there's not been much to report. The iOn has been going quite nicely thank you but I've got some stuff to talk about now.


Little Niggles
A few things that I have found irritating or just don't understand about the car:

1) It doesn't have a clock on the dashboard. Not even on the radio. This was a pain when my watch was in for repair last week and I just don't understand why there isn't one. It would be so simple just to fit a radio that has a clock display option like the one on every car I've ever owned since and including my F reg Mk2 Polo.

2) Why does it have "always on" running lights? Surely they just use up battery power unnecessarily? They've also confused me into thinking I had my headlights on in the dark when I didn't more than once.

3) The wing mirrors that fold in when you lock the car up. I know this is one of those things that has become fashionable on cars these days but the iOn simply doesn't need it. OK, it looks swish but the car is narrow enough anyway and surely, again, the motors to move them use up battery power.

Public Charging and a Little Bit of Maths
My card finally came through the post that allows me to use public charging points. I paid £5 for two weeks of unlimited use. Normally, if you were to buy an electric card you would buy a year long card for £100 which isn't bad at all. So for no other reason than sh*ts and giggles I took the car down to Riverside Park and plugged it in to one of their new charging points.

Charging at Riverside Park, Chester-le-Street.

Unlike the one at work these charging points tell you how much electricity you are using. Like this:

Taken about 30 seconds after I plugged it in.

Which normally would really just be there for interest but it allowed me to do some maths. Yippee! All the time I've had the car I've been wondering how much it was costing me in electricity. I should have prepared by checking how much electricity I normally use before I got the car and comparing it to how much I'm using now. But I didn't. So, in the time it was plugged in it used 1.6kWh which added an extra 2 miles of range. I've just checked Scottish Power tariff that I'm on and I pay 10.618p per kWh (after the first 225). So that means I'm paying (roughly, because the gauge in the car doesn't measure fractions of a mile) 8.4944p per mile. In my Fiat Stilo I get about 41mpg which equates to 9.02 miles/litre (I know I'm mixing my imperial and metric systems there but stay with me...). According to www.petrolprices.com the average price of petrol within 10 miles of where I live is 134.38p per litre so I'm paying 14.8980p per mile. If anyone wants to do the maths using the lowest possible price of petrol feel free. I couldn't be bothered but I think it's safe to say I'm saving on the fuel costs. Which we all knew but a few people have tried to tell me "People forget they have to pay for the electricity. It's not as cheap as you think."

That's another thing I've just thought of that I find interesting. People's reactions. Most people are genuinely interested and ask questions about what it's like to drive and how far it can go. Pretty much everyone, me included, has made a joke or two about it but I have met a few people who are actually quite hostile and react as if I'm some kind of environmentalist nut. They come out with all kinds of weird arguments about why electric cars are actually worse for the environment and seem to expect me to defend them and myself. I simply don't understand that. Well, actually I think it's fear of new technology that they don't understand. They don't know how to cope with that fear and think that the best defence against it is attack. What they don't seem to get is that I'm driving the car because I'm interested to know what it's like and to help build, in a very small way, some evidence for or against electric cars. I've already pointed out some floors and I'm more than willing to find that actually they don't work but I don't understand the mentality behind the the sort of thinking that says "I don't understand it so I'm going to pick out a few quotes from the media that help me to dismiss the idea of this new thing out of hand." It saddens me how incurious (is that a word?) some people are and how they don't understand people who are curious.

Anyway, that's enough for now. Tune in last week and miss next weeks instalment of Pigs in Sp....... Hang on, that's not my line is it?

Edit:
Just found out that all the additional electrics like the lights, mirrors and radio are powered by a standard car battery hidden under the bonnet. So I can continue to make the car flap it's ears like Dumbo and not worry about it reducing my range.

A Buzzin' Weekend

It was my first weekend with the iOn and I thought I'd give it a few little test. Although the most interesting thing to happen had almost nothing to do with the car but we'll come to that later. As I've mostly been driving on motorways on Saturday I decided to have a ride into Durham. Partly to see how it deals with lots of roundabouty A road driving and also to see if, in a highly pedestrianised city we should maybe nickname the car "Whispering Death". It turns out, as expected it deals very well with that environment. The regenerative breaking really comes in to its own. I started the day with 70 miles and after going to Durham and back the long way and pootling about Chester-le-Street a bit by the end of the day I still had 50 miles left. The pedestrians do notice it. The tyre noise and it's gentle hum is enough to alert them that there's something coming although lot's of them do a double take and you can see them saying "Oh, there's one of those electric cars. Like off Top Gear..."

Range Rage

I suffered my first bout of "range anxiety" tonight. For some reason charging the car at work today only got me 54 miles instead of the expected 70 (I'll have to look into that tomorrow) and due to particularly rubbish traffic (there was a bit of rain so therefore you have to slow down to 15 mph on the motorway, just have to) got home with about 30 left. Now that would have been fair enough, charge it over night, job's a good 'un. Except I got a call from my brother asking if I want to go and see one of his friends band in Newcastle so I suggest he might want a ride in the iOn - which he does. So by the time I'm ready to go the car has been charging for about an hour which you would have thought would top it up a little bit but no, by the time I get up to my brothers I'm down to 29 miles - very, very close to the distance of a round trip to Newcastle and back. I didn't want to by the guy that ran out of charge on the A1 so in the end we went for a quick drive round the block and then went to Newcastle in his diesel car. Which he had to fill up before we left...

I really do think this shows up the range limitations of the current crop of electric cars. I suppose, had it been a Leaf it's extra 30 miles of range would have meant I had no trouble but in a car with a maximum range of just over 70 you can't realistically make two reasonable length journeys in one day because you won't have enough time to charge it back up in between. Now if I had access to a fast charger at home it wouldn't be a problem but that would mean having special equipment installed. Also, I suppose if I'd been prepared I could have looked up charging points in town but saying that, would the 2 hours or so have been enough to top it up to safely get home? I'm not sure.

So there you go. Tonight's story. I don't want to leave it on a downer so I'll leave you with something I'm sure loads of people have said but it still made me chuckle when I heard it tonight: "You are what you tweet."

The Long Way Home

Tonight I decided to put the iOn to the test and came home from work the "fun" way. If you come off the A1 at the Metrocentre and head as if you were going up to Consett you can very quickly get your self onto some lovely, lumpy-bumpy, bendy country roads. The old Stilo wallows around them as if the suspension was made of marshmallow but it does iron out the lumps and bumps quite well so I wondered how the smaller Peugueot would do and was looking forward to maybe a slightly sportier, fun ride. Let's just say it was a bit jittery. The first section is still fairly urban with smooth, wide roads but with some pretty damn steep hills. These were absolutely no problem. Speed and acceleration up the hills was great and not having an gears meant hill starts were a doddle. Once I got into the countryside though things changed dramatically. It was bumping around, banging and crashing over little lumps - it wasn't very pleasant at all. In fact by the time I got home I had motion sickness. I was trying to drive it the same as I would drive the Fiat and I'm not a nutter of a driver but I had to slow down quite a lot just to keep the thing on the ground and going in the direction I wanted it to go. Of course none of this has anything to do with it being electric, it's all to do with what the car was designed to do. It is very much a city car. It's perfect for driving along city street and even motorway driving is good as long as you don't want to break to speed limit (which of course I don't) but it just wasn't designed for rural British roads. I'm not sure what they would have to do to make it better - perhaps softer suspension, longer travel in the suspension or even bigger wheels. Suggestions in the comments if you can think of any...

I realised earlier today that I hadn't mentioned much of what I know about the Peugeot iOn its self. When I found out I'd been chosen to do this I did a bit of research and found that it is in fact a "europeanised" Mitsubishi i-MiEV . Apart from sticking a few lions here and there I'm not entirely sure what Peugeot have changed on it. They may have made the interior a bit less bland and the front of the car looks a little better. And the name is slightly less silly. I don't even know how to say "i-MiEV." The i-MiEV itself is based on the i-kei conventional car which is an even sillier name so maybe we should be thanking the French for actually coming up with a half decent name. Even thought they did fall in to the "i in front of everything" trap. That's pretty much it, I didn't say I knew a lot about it.

First Impressions Last Forever

I've got it! The iOn is mine! Wahahahahaaaa! First impressions? Lets face it, it looks almost as silly as its name sounds. We'll leave that to one side for now though. It seems bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside and is actually quite comfortable (in the front anyway). Pulling away was odd, it's so quiet you think it might just be rolling away without any power then you realise that no, that's what it's like. After a lap around work I felt ready to hit the motorway but instead I had to hit the A1 Carpark. I should point out at this point that I had 50 miles of range left in the batteries as I left Great Park - this will become important later on. As I drove in the stop start traffic I was marvelling at the quiet smoothness of the thing but as I got into some free flowing traffic I realised how much noise as you drive is actually just road and wind noise and how quiet most modern engines must be. There wasn't a huge amount of difference between this and my Stilo. Don't get me wrong, it is quieter and smoother just not as much as you'd think.

Well hello there!

Hi, welcome to the first post on my very first blog. Let's get the disclaimers out of the way first - I have no idea what I'm doing with Blogger so you might find I make a few mistakes and delete stuff randomly, put weird, nonsensical posts up and make stupid mistakes with the formatting. For any of that I apologise in advance. I intend for the blog to evolve as I get used to it. I realise it's very "Blogger generic" at the moment but as time goes on and I get used to it all it should change shape and become more interesting to look at. It might even be interesting to read.