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Showing posts from March, 2015

Born Electric Guest Blogger: Meet Steve from Washington

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Hi! My name is Steve and I was born electric on August 15, 2012. You highly intelligent, super savvy readers may be questioning my sanity. Or, at the very least, fact-checking. And those dubious thoughts are spot on. The above picture is me putting gas into a new kind of EV: a BMW i3. And those understanding of the i3 know that, in 2012, the i3 only existed as an internal tension at BMW between the maniacal engineers that thought a mass-market car could be made extensively with carbon fiber and the bean counters that believed BMW i was a financial money pit destined to ruin Team Bavaria. Eureka! EV Bloodline Our first three EVs were all-electric Nissan LEAFs.  Back in the summer of 2012, we started replacing our gasoline-fueled family hauler fleet. The second LEAF came eight months later, making us an all-EV household. My wife and I defiantly and definitively proclaimed that we would never again visit a gas station. Then in 2014, I traded my beta test 2012 LEAF for a ready-f

Featured EV Product: The JLong

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The charging stations at the parking garage in Montclair, NJ are frequently ICE'd. This is a common problem across the country. Quick Charge Power has a solution: The JLong. If you drive an electric vehicle and rely on public charging infrastructure, then you've most likely come across situations where the public charging station you arrived at was blocked by a car that isn't plugged in. At the very least it's frustrating, and at the worst it's disastrous if you absolutely need to charge in order to continue driving that day. ICE-ing is an epidemic When an EV owner pulls up to a charging station and a gas car is parked there, they call it being "ICE'd," referencing the I nternal C ombustion E ngine of the car blocking them from charging. However this unfortunately isn't only happening with ICE vehicles. Now that electric vehicles are increasing in numbers and parking is always a premium in some locations, some EV owners are using the charging s

BMW i3: Understanding How Preconditioning Works

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Setting the preconditioning feature from the i3's iDrive is simple, but not as intuitive as I believe it could be. You can set the time of departure for every day of the week and the i3 will be charged, preconditioned and ready, provided you're charging from a proper 240v, level 2 electric supply.  In many ways electric cars are very similar to their internal combustion counterparts and that's by design. Most major OEMs are afraid to make something that's "too different" from what their existing customer base is comfortable with. However there are features in electric vehicles that are indeed drastically different. The first one that comes to mind is regenerative braking which allows the electric motor to convert the vehicle's kinetic energy back into electricity which in turn recharges the battery. This feature changes the driving dynamics of the car (some more than others depending on how aggressive the regenerative braking system is) and the operator ne