Today we’re taking a step away from the regular www.aminorjourney.com posts and looking at a personal project of mine – Velma, the Plug in Prius.
This weekend the weather has been nice enough to finally take the additional Prius battery packs which have been sitting in Velma’s luggage area and taking up valuable space.
Obviously the above arrangement isn’t great in anyone’s eyes. We need to figure out a more secure and permanent way of storing the two additional Prius batteries.
Read on after the jump to see the new battery arrangement take place.
This isn’t new persay, but those who heard the great news that the iMiev is now officially coming to the UK in November this year will be interested to see that the Mitsubishi micro site for the iMIev in Japan now includes a nice selection of video and information. I had the good fortune to…
Thanks to everyone who listened to EVcast #236 today live. Here’s the video from the show. The MP3 will shortly be up at the usual place, www.EVcast.com The video contains a raw version of the show. If you can cope with the horrible blips in sound please feel free to watch – otherwise, wait for…
I’ve just got back from the UK launch party for the two hottest electric motorbikes to hit the European market this year. (Zero launched the Zero X electric dirt bike in 2008, but we’ve not had the chance to get our leather-clad hands on them yet.)
Today however, the UK arm of Zero motorcycles launched the Zero S and Zero X to the UK market. For the small, select bunch of people gathered there there was only one reaction. WOW.
Unlike some of the electric ‘motorbikes’ which came before, the Zero S and Zero X are actually real motorbikes. There’s not a hint of scooter about them, unlike the Vectrix Maxi Scooter, which has for a long time had to deal with criticism from the biker community that it was nothing more than the plaything of rich commuters.
In fact, the Zero S (The road-legal version of the Zero Motorbike) is about as far removed from the Vectrix as you can get. Small, nippy and surprisingly fast, it’ll do up to 60 mph and has a maximum range of 60 miles. Although, I have to admit, if you’re going to have as much fun as the people trying them out today at the launch, perhaps that range won’t quite bit that far. Thanks to the incredibly low weight of the road bike (102.1kg) it’s got a phenomenal accelration and while I didn’t ride it myself (I had strict instructions from my partner and my family to never get a motorbike) I could see the grins on those who did take it for a spin on the quiet Hampshire lanes surrounding the launch venue.
The Zero S is one sexy electric motorbike.
More after the jump, including some photographs of the Zero X being ridden off-road
I’m not posting today, but here’s a video from today’s EVcast If you have a subscription to the mp3 podcast, you’ll find it appears in the next two days or so. But the recorded live video from the show is below. The sound quality isn’t as good as that in the mp3 file, but should…
One of the personal projects that keeps me busy is my own plug in car – my 2004 Toyota Prius. I converted the car from a regular Prius to a plug in Prius earlier this year. After a few initial hiccups with a bad battery causing one of the additional battery packs to die prematurely I’ve had a few months worth of plug in hybrid driving. But at the end of the day I have a driveable PHEV Prius, which I have the satisfaction of knowing I converted.
Today I filled up my car after finishing the second full tank of gas since converting the car to a plug in. The last time I filled up was on April 3rd. Today is May 8th. Admittedly, I was away for seven days during this period, but keeping up with this I’ll be only filling up once a month.
It's not a full EV, but I fell better with fuel economy like this...
I’m off to the UK launch of the Zero electirc Motorcycle. I’ll be doing an exclusive interview and a bit of a peek around the latest zero-emissions motorbike to hit the UK streets too. It happens on Monday, so expect something very soon afterwards on www.aminorjourney.com! I’m also hoping to cover it for EVcast. Talking…
Earlier on this week I ran an article detailing ten top DIY conversion links. I decided that perhaps it’d be nice to detail ten top PHEV sites for anyone interested in plugging their hybrid in. Unlike the EV conversion scene many plug in hybrid conversions are commercially done, partly due to the expense of battery packs and the demographic of the owners wanting conversions. However, it’s possible to convert a vehicle (existing hybrid or a regular engined car) to a plug in hybrid yourself. You just have to know where to look for help and ideas. Hopefully this list will help.
It is possible to convert a regular gas-powered car to a plug in hybrid too – so don’t think this list is exclusively for those Prius owners. While plug in hybrids aren’t anything new (the first one was back in the early 1900s) we’re certainly at a point where plug in hybrids are starting to enjoy a bit of a golden age. At least, I think that’s where we’re heading. I don’t think we can get to full electrics without at least a passing time of plug in hybrid popularity. I hope that in a few years’ time my list will need redoing as more and more conversion and PHEV options become available.
If I can convert my hybrid to a plug in then so can you!
After the jump are my top ten sites for PHEV DIY converters to look at. Most of them are Prius-based, but by no means are they all so. There’s some other plug in hybrids too. Some of the sites won’t give you much information and others may need a few revisits. I hope you enjoy them all.
Today is going to be a bit of a cop-out post, as I’m thoroughly exhausted from a very long Transcontinental flight. I won’t bore you all with the details but sufficed to say that the trip we made home was not the one we had booked on and involved a reroute to Paris. Add about…
