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 infrastructure is patchy at best. At worst it is a confusing mess of incompatible standards, over-priced…
Continue reading →
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! https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Its-a-Unix-system-short-SpLRTAGa6bU.mp4 Hmmm... I…
Continue reading →
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 boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. The Coming Civil War over …
Continue reading →
(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 the energy used to charge the car (aside: wonder if that's available as Open Data?). This means I…
Continue reading →
Regular readers will know that I have solar panels and an electric car. Is there any way to hook the panels up so they directly charge the car? Can I set my electrical system up to divert surplus electricity into the car when my house isn't using it. This is what I do with my hot water iBoost - when household energy usage is low, it automatically switches on my immersion heater. Can I rig up something similar for my car? I've been thinking about this - and I'm not quite sure that it's worth …
Continue reading →
A few months ago, I blogged about how cost efficient electric cars are. Last week I took delivery of a BMW i3 REX - so here's a quick review of the vehicle. A warning, I'm a grumpy, demanding, sod. I really like the car - but that doesn't blind me to its flaws. But first, and brief diversion into PHYSICS and MATHS! Physics Imagine a kilogram weight (1Kg) sat on an ice rink. You want to push the object 1 metre. The energy you require to accomplish this is 1 Joule. If you want to…
Continue reading →
After three years of driving a nifty little hybrid, it's time for my company car to be replaced. Of course, being a hippy, it's only right that I choose an electric vehicle (EV). Why? Cost, obviously. I've been obsessively tracking my fuel consumption using the Fuelly app. If I'm lucky, I get around 60MPG (UK) - given my mileage, the yearly cost is around £1,350. That means that my average cost per mile is £0.104 (over the last 3 years). Electric cars are, generally, more expensive to b…
Continue reading →
I'm currently test-driving a BMW's all-electric i3 REX. One of the options the demonstrator model has is a web browser! Yes, for just £95 per year, you can get a slow and painful browsing experience IN YOUR CAR! (Only to be used when fully stopped - or in autonomous drive mode.) Here's a quick run-down of its features. HTML5 A fairly miserable score of 268 out of 555 points on http://html5test.com/ The screen is 1280*480 with good visibility. It's slow to scroll and, even with the …
Continue reading →
