Test Drives – Aminorjourney

Ev’ie. Another broken dream?

If you’re a regular visitor to www.aminorjourney.com you’ll know that I’ve ran stories on the Electric Car Corporation and their line of converted Citroen C1s, which they call the C1 “Ev’ie”. It all started back in April, when the Citroen Ev’ie jumped onto the market. The team behind the advertising campaign had used a sign-written petrol-powered car for photo shoots and had omitted to change the number plate. It lead to me speculating if the vehicle even existed.

Later on, a test-drive from What Car? appeared, in which the team reviewing it had some issues with acceleration and a battery overheating on the drive. You can watch the video at their website.

I’m not the sort of person to give a company a hard time unnecessarily, and felt that perhaps my initial story was a bit hard on ECCPlc, the makers of the Citroen C1 Ev’ie. So, I arranged a trip down to London to test the Ev’ie for myself. I really wanted the car to blow me away. I so badly wanted the Ev’ie to make me feel all kinds of guilt for being nasty about it in the past without even having driven it. I wanted it to make me love it. But as I quickly found, my relationship with the Ev’ie that wasn’t going to be a plain-sailing one.

Read on after the jump for a run-down of the vehicle and our eventful test-drive.

Batteries away!

Continuing the report from the weekend’s work putting Velma the PHEV’s batteries out of sight I’m pleased to report that the physical battery relocation is finished. Velma is drivable again! More after the jump, along with the (almost) finished Prius trunk! Normal PHEV and EV articles will resume tomorrow. Picking up from yesterday’s post –…

It’s official. The iMiev is on it’s way.

According to The Register, the Mitsubishi iMiev will be available in the UK from November. Perfect timing then for those EV enthusiasts with £20,000 to burn and a space on their Christmas list. Sadly, only fifty of the cars will be available at the end of the year. I suspect this will mean that they…

Zero % Scooter 100% motorbike.

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

Identity Insight Crisis

Given the nice weather we’ve been having here in the UK for the past few days I thought I’d take advantage of some rare spare time and head to the local Honda garage today to see if I could test-drive the new Honda Insight. I went incognito, sans camera, to see if I could get a real feel for how the dealership, and the Insight, performed.

The 2010 Insight. Better than the Prius in some things, worse than it in others.

What I found was a very fuel efficient car with a confused soul. Somewhere between drawing board and final model, the new Insight feels like a car unsure of what it really is. I’m quite sure it will find a market, but it feels like Honda have tried so hard to please everyone that they’ve managed to produce a car which doesn’t please anyone.

Category: Test Drives