Vehicles in motion

[rmd]

Well, it's time. My beloved MINI is getting a bit long in the tooth and it seems like it's getting ready to go live on a farm in the country where it can frolic with the other parts cars. So I figured that I'd stay ahead of the game and start figuring out what to replace it with. I opted for a Honda Fit, and then the July 4th sale incentives hit, so I'm going to be picking up a new Fit next week.

They offered me kind of crap value for trade-in on the mini (to be fair, they think they'll just send it to auction), so I'll probably swing by one of the used car places in Somerville and see if they'll do better. If not, I'll see if the dealership will go for slightly less cash and throw in a bunch of accessories. I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the annoyance and work to do a private sale via CL or ebay or something. I suspect not.

Since the Fit is more spacious than the MINI, I figure if I get a set of roof racks for that, it'll cover 95% of what I do with the truck, so I can get rid of the truck as well.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Not so much. I regularly do one-day round trips to the middle of Cape Cod, plus I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect my current electrical service can't support an at-home charger if it's the typical big 40A types.

I occasionally check in on the state of the art with regard to electric motorcycles/vespa-scooters and electric bikes etc, since my usual work commute is just across the length of Somerville.

[irilyth]

You can charge on a 120V outlet at about 4 miles of range per hour, so if you only ever go 30 or 40 miles in a day, you can recharge overnight at home off a regular outlet. I was doing this for a while, until Chargepoint put in free chargers at the garage at work. :^)

You could probably get down to the Cape, but you'd want a 240V charger there in order to make it home that day. (If you could park it for 24 hours, you could charge off of 120V there too, but that's pretty limiting.) So that's probably not very feasible.

Higher-range options are coming soon, but not yet. (Is my vague impression, if you've spent any time at all looking at this then you probably know more than I do. :^)

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

BTW, if you're considering electric bikes, let me know. I'm working for a company that builds them...