Daily Archives: July 26, 2017

The Milton Keynes Electric Vehicle Experience Centre (EVEC) has Launched

July 26, 2017Blog, BMW, BP Chargemaster, Charging, Electric Cars, EVEC, Golf GTE, i3 94Ah, Leaf, Milton Keynes, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Outlander PHEV, VolkswagenTrevor Larkum

Last weekend saw the long awaited opening of the Electric Vehicle Experience Centre (EVEC) in Milton Keynes. It officially opened to the public on Saturday 22nd July. It is funded through a government scheme awarded to the local council and is managed by Chargemaster, the company that has installed the majority of charge points around Milton Keynes.

The Preview Event at the Electric Vehicle Experience Centre (Image: T. Larkum)

The EVEC is essentially a car showroom for electric cars but is located in a shop space on Crown Walk in the main centre:mk shopping centre (it’s close to the middle and next to Boots). It doesn’t resemble an out-of-town dealership so much as the boutique style shops developed by Tesla, Apple and most mobile ‘phone companies.

EVEC Purpose

The aim of the Centre is to both showcase existing electric models and be an information point for EV ownership in general. Visitors will be able to talk with staff about all elements of owning and running an EV, with test drives available too. It has been established to increase the number of EVs sold in the area. Milton Keynes’ target is for 23% of all new cars registered locally to be electric by 2021.

We are grateful to Chargemaster for inviting us to the Preview Event on Friday Night (Jo’s thoughts: A Little Bit of Zen). Most of the other guests appeared to be existing EV owners. The showroom housed examples of the Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, Volkswagen Golf GTE and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. There were drinks and snacks, and then introductory speeches by David Martell, Chief Executive of Chargemaster, and Ted Foster, the new EVEC Manager. After the talks we had an opportunity to talk to Ted and the other staff.

EVEC Test Drives

As well as providing help and guidance on electric cars and EV driving, the EVEC is also making cars available for test drives. These can be short accompanied drives, however there is also the option of week-long extended test drives. For these there will be a charge (we understand about £70) largely to cover the inevitable cost of insurance. That’s seems fair to us – £10 per day to drive a new car, particularly considering the fuel costs will be negligible.

The Preview Event at the Electric Vehicle Experience Centre (Image: J. Pegram-Mills)

The enthusiasm of the EVEC ‘gurus’ is clear and we certainly appreciate the enthusiasm and resources that have gone into building and staffing the first dedicated electric vehicle showroom in the UK (and probably in the world). We wish it every success and will be supporting it by passing local customers to it for test drives.

If you live near Milton Keynes and are interested in taking a test drive in any one of a large range of new electric cars (including the Renault ZOE, Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, Golf GTE, and others) just get in touch with us on 01908-904020, or by email at sales@ fuelincluded.com.

Ecotricity Change Cost Structure of their Rapid Chargers.

July 26, 2017Blog, Charging, Ecotricity, Electric CarsJo

Ecotricity recently changed the cost structure for their rapid chargers. Below is a summary of the letter they sent to their customers explaining the changes.

It is about a year since Ecotrictity introduced ‘charging for charging’ on the Electric Highway, after being free to use for five years. Charging was set at a rate of £6 for 30 minutes, with intention to monitor use and later produce “a more sophisticated approach to charging”.

With that now done a new model has been developed and rolled out, promising to give

“more flexibility and typically lower charging costs across all makes and models”.

The new rates are charged at 17p per unit, which they explain is

“pretty much the rate that people pay at home”

the cost of providing the service is administered via a £3 connection fee for all sessions.

Dale Vince wrote

“In our modelling this will typically lower the cost of charging for all makes and models as well as charge more proportionally for energy taken.”

They have also increased the maximum length of charging sessions to 45 mins, it is hoped this will offer greater flexibility to those customers who need a bit longer to charge up.

For Ecotricity customers there currently is no connection fee, this reflects their opinion that their customers’ energy bills help them build the network.

Those existing Ecotricity customers that benefit from the offer of 52 free charges in a year will continue to benefit from this arrangement until their first anniversary with the company, or their first 52 charges (whichever comes first). After this they will be automatically transferred to the new charging model.

The new rates and process came into effect on 26th June 2017, it is recommended that customers of update their mobile phone app’s to pick up the new tariff changes.

Information Source: Email from Ecotricity

Tesla Rolls Out Its First Model 3, and It’s Elon’s

July 26, 2017Electric Cars, Model 3, News, Reviews and Comment, TeslaJo

It’s finally here: The Model 3, Tesla’s $35,000 electric gamechanger. A single black Model 3 rolled off the production line Friday with a serial number all its own, kicking off a company-defining six months. The car will belong to Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and co-founder, who shared images of it on Twitter over the weekend.

Serial Number: 1. This one goes to Musk.

Tesla has already taken in roughly half a billion dollars in Model 3 deposits, at $1,000 apiece, and its proposed ramp-up schedule would have it rivaling well-established U.S. market peers like BMW and Mercedes by year’s end. The only thing standing between Tesla and being the world’s first mass-market electric carmaker is proving it can build, deliver, and service enormous numbers of these vehicles—without sacrificing quality.

The production acceleration will be slow at first. Tesla plans to hand over the keys to 30 cars at a launch celebration on July 28. It then envisions building 100 cars—less than three a day—for the month of August, according to a series of Twitter posts by Musk last week. September will bring another 1,500 cars, and the ramp will build to a rate of 20,000 cars a month by December, Musk said. It’s an aggressive schedule that will more than double Tesla’s total production rate in six months, and then quintuple it by the end of next year.

If Tesla achieves all of Musk’s targets, it will build more battery-powered cars next year than all of the world’s automakers combined in 2016. U.S. sales under Musk’s 2018 targets would significantly outpace the BMW 3 Series and the Mercedes C-Class, the best-selling small luxury cars in the country.

Tesla, by tradition, delivers the first new car off the line to the first customer to pay full price once the car officially goes on sale. Musk’s collection includes the first Tesla Roadster and the first Model X—but not the first Model S. That trophy belongs to Tesla board of directors member Steve Jurvetson, who told the Chicago Tribune in 2010 that he scored the first of Tesla’s flagship sedans by writing out a check just before a board meeting and tossing it across the table. The right to the first Model 3 was won by board member Ira Ehrenpreis, who then gifted it to Musk for his 46th birthday, on June 28.

The Uninhabitable Earth

July 26, 2017Energy and Climate Change, Opinion, Prepping and CollapseJo

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful.