Monthly Archives: December, 2020

Ass-onance

Rose suggested a better rhyme for the old carol:

    Oh, the holly bears a berry as green as the grass
    And Mary fled to Egypt on the back of an ass!

It works better if you pronounce ‘grass’ the way she does, rather than the way I do!

29 years ago today…

…I was fortunate enough to marry this rather gorgeous girl. Can’t imagine what she was thinking.

Your electrons, sir. Will that be all, sir?

When I was young, you didn’t put your own petrol in your car. Self-service petrol stations were still a novelty in the UK, and you just drove up to the pump, wound down the window and said, “Fill her up with four-star, please!” (That’s a phrase, I realise, that would be unknown to anyone under about forty years of age here.) It was terribly civilised… assuming that an attendant was available when you needed them. Interestingly, in New Jersey (and one or two other small areas of the States), self-service fuelling is illegal. I had this explained to me by the attendant when I tried it once…

Of course, a visit to a petrol station today is often simultaneously smelly, messy and expensive, which is why I’m glad that it’s been a very rare experience for me in the last five years: most of my refuelling comes from just plugging my EV in at home. This has, however, been considerably easier since I had my own driveway; for the first couple of years I had on-street parking only.

About 40% of the homes in the UK don’t have any off-street parking — the vast majority of those being in inner cities — and this does make EV ownership much harder. It’s a lot better than it used to be, today’s cars having much larger batteries and recharging much more quickly than when I started. Going to the charger once a week for a quick top-up is more viable now, if you can’t, say, charge at work, but it’s still not as handy as plugging in your car overnight at home.

So I was interested to receive an email this week from a new service called Zumo. They will appear at your doorstep on their e-scooters, take your car away overnight and return it to you, fully charged, in the morning. I have no idea how commercially viable this is in the longer term, but I think it’s a great idea, and I applaud their ingenuity. The opportunity to add extra services, such as cleaning, checking the tyre pressures and the washer fluid etc — maybe even an overnight MOT test — could make for a very low-hassle car ownership experience!

Eventually, of course, cars will be able to go off and charge themselves. Five years ago, Tesla released a little video (below) showing how they might be able to plug in when they get to the charging station. Cunning, but a little bit creepy!

In the meantime, however, I wish Zumo every success, and I hope they can find a pricing model that works.

Where have you bin all my life?

I have a new car. It’s rather clever. As I’m driving along it can recognise nearby vehicles, people, cyclists, traffic cones…

But I was somewhat amused yesterday to discover that it can also recognise wheelie-bins.

(Click for a larger image.)

I’m trying to imagine what I would have thought, back in the days of my old rusting Minis and Hillman Imps, if you’d told me that one day my car would have a built-in ability to recognise and draw pictures of the waste-disposal facilities it was passing…

Gunshot

Barton Road Rifle Range

The Barton Road Rifle Range as seen from the next field, on a recent misty evening.

Redundant Yuletide Instructions?

Waitrose are, once again, selling mice pies under the ‘Heston’ brand. Apparently, this is something to do with a celebrity chef and has nothing to do with Ben Hur.

Anyway, they’re rather good, as you can see from the emptiness of the packet.

However, I couldn’t help feeling that since they were mince pies, and in particular ‘Night Before Christmas Mince Pies’, the label ‘Best before 14th January’ might be somewhat superfluous?

Driving from the past to the future

Yesterday was an interesting day for me: I part-exchanged my old electric car for a new one, and got a vision of the future.

I had a great fondness for my old BMW i3, despite its foibles; we had been through a lot together in the pioneering early days of EV ownership (that is, about five years ago!) But it definitely represented the past, and, given that part of my plan here has been to try living in the future, it was time for a change. Before selling it, I charged it at the new Gridserve Electric Forecourt (and almost had a charging experience reminiscent of the early days!). But everything worked out in the end.

Here’s a video.

If you don’t want to see me reminiscing about my experiences with the i3, you might want to start 7 minutes in!

Christmas purchasing advice for geeks

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be beautiful, or believe to be useful, or can connect to Home Assistant .

If buying for others, you may need two of the above.

The light of the charge brigade?

The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.

It has no fewer than 36 rapid chargers, and most of them are very rapid; there are a dozen that can supply 350kW (which almost nothing can actually consume, yet, but they’re future-proofing). 350kW, to give you an idea, would gain you about 25-30 miles of range for every minute you’re plugged in. There’s a bank of the Tesla v3 superchargers, too, which can do up to 250kW.

Now, you might well ask, how can you supply this quantity of electricity, even with that many solar panels? Well, the answer is that, as well as a good grid connection, they have an enormous battery pack next door and a solar farm just down the road. While you’re charging, there are cafes, loos and shops available.

I haven’t visited yet, but it just so happens I’ll be in that area next week, so I may well take a look.

Oh, and they’re hoping to build 100 of these.

In the meantime, there’s a Fully Charged video about it, which will probably be available to the general public about the time you read this:


Update, a bit later:

I did visit here the following week, just after it had opened to the public; here’s a clip from my vlog post at the time:

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser