Riding the Xebra to work

Day one with the car at work: Success! There was a tailwind going to work and actually got near to 50 mph but really seems to consistently make 40 and even 45 on occasion. A lot of questions from co-workers about the car. It generated some fair measure of excitement and the interest of course drew some disparaging comments from upper management, i.e. does it have enough power to drive over his foot, stuff like that. The most pressing question was in regard to the selling price. Including registration and a dealer fee and the ferry cost to come to Ketchikan, it has run nicely just below $10,000 for the car.

Including the trip home for lunch, my total mileage for one day to work and back is about 13 miles. That's a gallon of gas on the Ford, but today I didn't burn it. The Ford sat on the street and I used the clean energy provided by the KPU hydro facility at Swan Lake to power the electric car.

I got the Green Car Co tech on the phone and had a chance to ask several questions, including proper charging of the batteries. It seems that by luck or something I have done everything right so far. He said that the first days I should run the batteries as low as possible, totally tap them, and then charge for a good long time. I ended up charging them overnight, so for about 12 or 14 hours after running completely out of juice at my mother in law's house they got a complete charge. The tech said that a lot of people don't deplete their batteries thinking that keeping them charged is good but actually this makes them shallow and unable to hold a full charge.

Depleting them and re-charging them in the first cycles establishes some kind of long-term benchmark for the batteries, and conditions them to accept a full charge but also to deliver current to the level established on this first use. So they will provide energy to the very last and re-charge completely to their peak. In fact, the batteries had a speck over 90 volts in them this morning. I think that means they got a full charge! It is an 84 volt system, after all!!