ODO 8283 miles

BMW i3 (Credit: BMW)

{Imagine a deep-voiced announcement}
In preparation for the Super Bowl, please enjoy this sneak peak of the BMW i3 commercial called "Newfangled Idea"

What did you think? So I have this shirt with the word "darwinisme" with a sperm squiggle that transforms into an @. The other day, I had to explain that shirt to my daughter. Will she ever get it? I doubt it but she will surely have her own parallel experience.

Here's one to think about: Running on fumes. As we transition to a transformed perhaps majority electrified transportation system, will she think back on the days when running on fumes was the modus operandi for Mom, always on the lookout for the next diesel station?

ODO 8216 miles

A gem to think about from Jerry Brown's recent California State of the State address - a quote from Edward O. Wilson, father of biodiversity: "we are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants." I feel like those of us that drive and support the growing EV community are at least trying to slow the process, maybe not spinning our gold into straw as fast as we have been.

One way to slow that process is to continue to build up the EV infrastructure. And where do we spend most of our waking hours? I spend them at work. So workplace charging seems like a natural place to concentrate our effort. As a strong start, the US DOE Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy has issued the Workplace Charging Challenge. Is your employer on the list? Yeah! UCLA is! Boo...UC Berkeley is not (again I'm surprised by the lack of EV support in the City of Berkeley). As you can see from all the orange dots, I think the geographic diversity is a good sign. There's almost one company in every state. How can we get that wide area just east of the Rockies involved? MT, WY, ND, SD, NE. Now there is a recently installed Tesla supercharger station in Lusk, Wyoming. You gotta start somewhere. Maybe what we really need an an electric pickup truck.

ODO 7999 miles

Sony

I've never been much of a gadget person so it shouldn't surprise anyone that I haven't followed the Consumer Electronics Show in years past. But this year, news of the happenings at CES trickled in and I was surprised that Monday's keynote speaker was from a car company. I guess it wasn't just any car company, but Dr. Z from Mercedes Benz. I was stuck scratching my head - since when did a car become a consumer electronic? Consumer electronics to me are my yellow Sony walkman cassette player that I got as a gift when I was 12 or the laptop I'm writing this blog on. It never crossed my mind that my car would be in the same category as my walkman, but the times, they are a changin'. So much so that CNET called it "the year of the car at CES 2015" and Business Insider declared "CES 2015 is all about the car of the future."

So here are my highlights {even though I wasn't there in person}. Or rather highlight: autonomous vehicles. Audi sent a self-driving car from 550 miles from San Francisco to Las Vegas. BMW has a watch with an app that will instruct your EV to come pick you up (video). Volkswagen will park your car for you, and used the e-Golf as the base vehicle to demonstrate the technology. 

In EV news, there may be 3 minute charging in the future, if this Israeli start-up is successful. And a electric scooter called the Gogoro Smartscooter with battery swapping infrastructure (well, I know how that worked out for Project Better Place). ChargePoint launched a sleek EV charger, ChargePoint Home, that links to Nest and has an app for additional controls. Ah, the marriage of EV and IoT has come at last.

Now, I'm looking forward to next year's CES, if only to understand what my walkman and EV have in common. For now, I think they are both just really cool.

ODO 7726 miles

 

A potpourri of posts, beginning with my recent trip to the Bay Area (hence a slow down in posts since I could not {yet} drive the Spark from LA to SF). 

We stayed in Berkeley for about a week between Christmas and New Year's so I thought I'd look up my electric vehicle charging options, should I ever decide to move back to this part of the Bay. Well, I'm a little bit disheartened by my results - the screenshot on the lower right. Seriously, I count 4 charging station locations with two more coming. I am a proud Berkeley grad times three but am a little embarrassed that Berkeley is not leading the way with electric vehicle infrastructure. Especially compared to San Francisco on the left (equal area screenshot), a city that I think is more public transit oriented than Berkeley. A quick look at Berkeley's Climate Action Plan infographic shows no mention of electric vehicles. I really hope the 2014 update includes some concrete action for progress.

Next up, winter solstice. Out of curiosity, I thought I would check out the action from our solar panels. What I really wanted to see was if the shortest day of sunlight was noticeable as a turning point in our daily solar production. Well, I don't see it, at least not yet. I definitely see the dramatic winter drop-off but December 21-22 don't stick out as we swing back into longer days. I'm going to keep my eyes on it.

Lastly, a quick update on the local Tesla charging stations. 12 Tesla charging stations were recently installed at the local Westfield mall in Culver City (12/19). I was surprised and excited to see this advancement for EVs at the mall where I was dropped off at as a pre-teen to kill time. I swung by today to see if anyone was using them and found 5! Teslas charging at Fox Hills. I admit I was skeptical that this particular location would be successful. But I was wrong. Only one of the Tesla drivers decided it was best to sit in her car while it was charging, instead of shopping at JCPenney. Go Culver City!