Scooter left to storage

As winter’s coming, I decided finally take the scooter to storage. I logged just below 900km’s before checking it in. I had hoped for more mileage with it, but the weather this autumn has been pretty awful and my schedules too tight, so the car had more use than I had planned.

As a report for this year, scooter worked perfectly, except for the front drum break which had a little scraping sound once a while and the malfunctioned turning lights. Funny thing is that these are one of the few “good old” parts of technology this little machine has inside. They will repair and check those where I left it stored at (MP-hotelli) for the winter months. They will also keep the batteries recharged. The motor, batteries etc. themselves worked like a charm. It really started to feel like the dependable machine I could rely on. And I’m gonna miss it.

But don’t think it’s the end of electric mobility for this winter. We’ll see…

Where are all the electric vehicles?

I can’t help to notice how many gasoline powered cars there are all around me. While I’m driving my clean, quiet and fun(!) little scooter amids these polluting metal monsters, I feel like a guy who’s already stopped smoking while everyone else is still continuing with their old bad habits. Somehow I feel out of place. Especially when driving behind a truck, a bus or just a regular smelly gasoline powered scooter or moped, I get to inhale all the crap coming out of their tailpipes.

It’s also strange that most of these cars are occupied by only the driver. This really points out how much our current transportation system NEEDS some rethinking. In a gasoline car only 1% of the energy in gasoline is used to move the person around. Jusk as yourself, how stupid is that? I bet my 135 kilogram electric scooter with ~4kWh/100km energy consumption does a much better job. The climate is changing and oil is getting harder and harder to drill (and more expensive) and still we continue like nothing is happening.

And as the technology is already so cheap that you can get this kind of vehicle with less than 2000 euros, common sense tells me these should be much more popular than they are now. Especially now as gasoline costs 1.5 to 1.6 euros per litre (almost $8 per gallon) over here. And there should already be more affordable options to choose from that we could use all around the year. Sure, there are now some tiny slow electric cars that we could use even during the winter months, but even they are insanely expensive for what you get. You could get couple decent (used) gasoline cars for the price of one of these. The technology itself shouldn’t be that expensive or “unproven”. They’ve made pretty good electric cars that could fit the bill already during the 1970′s(!), so why it is so hard to build a decent priced electric car that we could use for more than 90% of our driving in 2011?

But even here in our capital area around Helsinki, a lot of people could already use these cheap electric two-wheelers almost 8 months a year, for all their commuting, instead of relying either on their polluting cars or our weak and unreliable public transportation system. As an example, I’m using one to travel to work for a distance of 20km back and forth. And most people would travel less than this. But I have to detour quite a lot. Straight line would be only 13km, but our road network where I can travel with my max. 50km/h (officially 45km/h) scooter  is rather limited. And I’m not even planning of using bicycle lanes. I think they are not appropriate for such a heavy vehicle, traveling more than 30km/h.

Yeah, I’m getting a bit depressed as I  need to take my scooter to storage, as the temperatures are going to drop below zero within a few weeks. It just gets a bit too slippery for my own safety and comfort. Good news is that I have some light shining at the end of this tunnel, although I do not know how long the tunnel is.

Jolt! and Revenge of the Electric Car

Here’s an interesting book. I have not (yet) read it, but it sounds quite interesting. It tells about the same phenomenom I’m following on this blog – and I think it’s a common challenge all around the world, not just in the good old US of A. I believe that also Finland should really jump into this electric boom going on all over the world. We have lots of technological know-how and we should really make an effort to use it. We can’t afford to be left behind. Electric vehicles and renewable energy is what could change the heading of our society into a much more sustainable path. But all our government is doing right now is debating on how to save Greece from it’s self-inflicted doom.

“Billmaier outlines how EVs will propel the coming “electriconomy”, a consumer-driven economic boom that will be ignited as society is transformed from an oil-based economy to one powered by electricity. The electriconomy will dwarf all previous technology revolutions—it will be bigger than the computer and Internet markets combined—and will catapult the economy of whichever nation masters it.”

Also the movie “Revenge of the Electric Car” (trailer here) is finally arriving to theaters in some parts of the world. I hope they will get here too, but I doubt about that. I can only hope that there will be digital copy available in iTunes etc. so that we could see it here in our backward country.