Sunday and there appears to be no-one charging at Kits Beach this morning. If something is too good to be true then it probably isn’t. The Flo app maintains this idea and when we arrive all the spaces are empty. But when we plug in no electricity flows. So I hit the help button on the app. This turns out not be a Good Idea at all. The number it dials is different to that on the machine, and it adds an extension which answers in French. Then plays music. So I end that call and dial the number on the charger, which gives me a chance to pick English from the menu, and gets answered by a human str ..read more

This showed up in my email today. I have been hearing about people who wanted to hang on to their classic cars but retrofitted them to be electric vehicles. The prices that were quoted were eye watering. This one is new to me. BC is already one of most electrified car provinces on the country. But this company is on our doorstep. And is worth checking out – or at least watching the short video. “Blue Dot Motorworks, a Seattle-based start-up developing universal retrofit kits that can convert virtually any conventional vehicle into a plug-in hybrid, is positioned to address this challenge with ..read more

A month ago I took delivery of a new Toyota Prius Prime. This blog post is about my experience of becoming an EV driver. I can say that since although this car does have an internal combustion engine it has hardly burned any fossil fuel at all since I acquired it. I would have liked to buy an electric car, but the condo where I live is not allowing new EV owners to charge their vehicles. Some people have been using the existing receptacles in the garage – originally intended for owners to be able to plug in a vacuum cleaner now and then. There are very few of these 110v outlets and only a few ..read more

The Press Release below arrived at lunchtime today, just when we were talking about cars, again. Now that Modo has a car close to us, I have started to use it for pre-booked trips. The car is a Toyota Prius, and the traffic was so congested this morning, coming back from Oakridge along 49th that I was easily able to keep the car in EV mode all the time. We live in a condo with underground parking, and people using EVs have become something of an issue. Initially because they weren’t paying for those charges. That has been changed to a flat fee for people with EVs. I have an older, conventional ..read more

Quite a lot happening recently, some of which relates to issues that have been dealt with in blog posts on here. So I thought that I should do a single post to bring you up to date. I will also add the links to the previous posts on the topic just in case there are some readers who missed them first time around. Arbutus Mall Redevelopment The second stage of the project is now getting started in earnest. This week the excavators arrived and started tearing down the remains of the Mall Building. This used to accommodate the Safeway Pharmacy, BC Liquor Store, Bank of Montreal and Dance Company ..read more

  This review has been removed. The representative of the PR firm pushing the publicity campaign for its publication  has a different view of the meaning of “Fair Use” which, if followed, would have made this review incoherent. I am not willing to do that.                           ..read more

A powerpoint presentation by Dale Bracewell (Manager of Transportation Planning, City of Vancouver) via Twitter Three sample slides Download the complete presentation ..read more

There is a lively debate going on first as a result of some research at North Carolina State and then some rebuttals at web sites like Slate. I was going to join in there but there are already 197 comments there – and anyway I am going to drag this off. It is not about the emissions – or lack of them. As I have said here before, the problem is that they are still cars. Cars are the problem. An electric car is a little bit better than an internal combustion engine car – but then a Smart car is better than an SUV or a Car2Go smart car is better than either. And in actual experience th ..read more

These electric Smart cars have been part of the Car2Go fleet in Vancouver for a while now. I have not actually seen one until today. I was taking a look at my Android car2go app after getting an email this morning. Car2Go had been “experiencing a partial disruption in service” this morning, so I was curious what the app would show. Turns out that not only was there an available car right outside but there was a little electric logo on it. By the way the Car2Go app for Android is much better than any other I have used (iOS or Symbian) The vehicle looks much like any other car2go. I think the ..read more

Thanks to Sightline again for the link to an AP article in the Seattle Times. It is a very useful, non-technical review of the lack of progress in battery technology. “It’s why electric cars aren’t clogging the roads” which is a useful bit of reality check against the optimism expressed by the report I looked at yesterday. As for the electric car industry, lithium ion batteries have proved to have two major drawbacks: They are costly, and they do not allow automobiles to go far enough between rechargings. A123, a maker of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, went bankrupt last year becaus ..read more