Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance. Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies: There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points. Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the…
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Back when nuclear power stations were first proposed, we were promised "energy which is too cheap to meter". That is, the cost of electricity would be so low, invoicing for its use would be prohibitively expensive. Well, that didn't exactly turn out that way! But as our electronics have become more efficient, the cost of processing payments begins to outweigh the cost of providing electricity. …
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I'm now on my third EV. You can read my thoughts on the BMW i3 and the Renault Zoe. This review is primarily focussed on the tech included with the car. Bluetooth Connects quickly, and no glitches with streaming audio. Call quality was clear, but didn't show caller's photo - which is a shame. Doesn't show album artwork - so no AVRCP 1.6 support. I couldn't get it to do a 30-second-skip…
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I've been driving EVs for a few years now - and people often ask me about running costs. I can't tell you what your insurance, maintenance, or leasing costs will be - but I can show you how much it costs to drive. Here's a fairly recent trip in my Renault Zoe: That's a mixture of motorways in the cold, and gentle country paths in the summer. Hopefully typical of a mixed driving style. It…
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The good folks at BlueSkySea have sent me their 1080p dashcam to review. It's a sub-£50 dashcam with built in WiFi and a 150° field of view. Let's take it for a spin! Unboxing and first use Video Samples Video resolution: 1920x1090 formatted to play back at 1920x1080. Audio: 16KHz AAC stereo - although seems to be mono. Just about good enough to clearly pick up voices in the car. File S…
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Last year I reverse engineered Renault's Electric Car API. One of the curious omissions was mileage - it just doesn't appear there. However! All is not lost. If you log in to your Renault Account - https://www.renault.co.uk/my-account/my-car.html - you'll get details back about your car including its make, model, date of next service, and mileage! Why isn't this in the regular API? Who knows. …
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Last year I published details of the BMW i3's API. I've now swapped my i3 for a Renault Zoe - so I thought I'd perform the same exercise. edent's Car@edent_car🔋 100%🚗 76 miles🔌 Plugged in⚡ Not charging⚠ Secured and Locked#RenaultZOE❤️ 1💬 0🔁 020:18 - Sat 15 October 2016 All these API calls can be found by using the Renault ZE Services website. I am indebted to this German blog post for kicking o…
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I've spent an entire year driving the BMW i3 Electric Car. This is a long-ish term review which is intended to reflect my experience with the car and the UK's charging infrastructure. I spent three days a week commuting between Slough and Oxford, on a mix of motorways and quieter streets. I drove all the way to Norwich and back, and made regular trips into London. The UK's charging…
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I accidentally caused a little brouhaha last week - for which I would like to apologise. In my blog post about BMW's unencrypted software updates, I said: Judging from the files, it would appear that the infotainment system is made by Magneti Marelli with components by Wind River, AutoSAR, and Nvidia Tegra. Looking at the copious mentions of systemd and freedesktop it's a Linux system! …
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The BMW i3 is an amazing electric car - let down by very shoddy software. That's a huge problem - software runs our lives and, if it is defective, it can ruin us. We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris…
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(To the tune of the popular Mary Poppins song.) How much does it really cost to drive an electric car? Well, I've had my BMW i3 for a few months, so I thought I'd crunch the numbers. As part of the UK Government's OLEV scheme, there's a subsidy for installing car charging points at home. One of the conditions of the subsidy is that a smart meter is installed which reports back details about…
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I'm really enjoying driving the BMW i3. I'd love to have it tweet its driving efficiency, or upload its location to my server, or let me turn on its air-conditioning when the temperature gets too warm - there are a hundred interesting things to do with the car's data. The official app has some of these features - but is slow, ugly, and a pain to use. BMW used to have an API available for…
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