Zero Motorcycles announced today specifications and pricing for their 2015 lineup of electric motorcycles. The Scotts Valley, CA, based company has been building electric motorcycles since 2006, and its’ market leadership is demonstrated through multiple models addressing both off-road and on-road motorcycling. The improvements for the 2015 model year are…
I’ve recently written a few blog posts about the Blink Network and its problems. The other day I posted a not-so-well-thought-out survey of questions about Blink, and other charging networks. The results weren’t very conclusive because of the small number of responses, but did agree with the widely held belief…
Tesla Motors has been criticized for not including any kind of driver assist features in the Model S. Driver Assist features are commonplace among not only luxury cars, but regular cars, now. Some of them take care of tasks like parallel parking, while others help the driver do so safely.…
Because electric car battery packs are expensive, some in the industry think the pack should be leased separately from the car. Doing so would reduce the price of an electric car, making it more affordable, speeding up electric car adoption. That was the value proposition offered by Better Place, for…
The question of whether Blink is gouging its customers, or not, raises a set of questions in my mind. Is that really what Blink is doing? Do the majority of EV drivers really think Blink is gouging them? What about the other charging networks? Maybe what I’m seeing is just…
A few days ago I asked whether Blink’s recent pricing change for charging services was gouging consumers. That pricing change had some welcome changes, such as switching from charging by the hour to charging by the minute. But the effect has been a drastic increase in the cost of a…
What if it’s time to buy a new car, what do you choose? Thanks to lithium-ion battery technology, we now have a new drive-train choice. Rather than being limited to variant of gasoline engined vehicles, we can now buy electrified cars or motorcycles. Assuming you’ve already chosen to go electric…
California’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure may get a huge shot in the arm starting in 2015-16. The California Building Code (CBC2016) appears set to require electric vehicle charging infrastructure in newly constructed parking lots, or housing. I say “appears” because the information is coming from draft building code documents, full…
About 11 1/2 years ago I took to the streets with thousands of others to shout “Not In My Name” and otherwise protest against the illegal invasion of Iraq, the illegal toppling of its government, etc. I spent a lot of time back then reading about the War which ensued,…
Over the weekend California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a list of bills focusing on climate change issues, some of which would expand support for electric cars. I’ve seen some in the EV community applaud these moves, but I see a mixed bag of some things which might be useful and…
From the viewpoint Silicon Valley’s award-winning National Drive Electric Week celebration yesterday, electric cars are becoming mainstream. Our region is enjoying the highest rate of electric car sales in the country, and for our 2014 NDEW event we had the intention to have the largest assemblage of electric vehicles anywhere.…
We are facing many problems in the world, like climate change, peak oil, financial collapse, resource wars over access to fossil fuels, and environmental catastrophes like the collapse of sea life in the ocean. Any of these are seriously difficult problems, and they’re hitting us all at the same time.…
President Obama was elected in 2008 on a platform promising, among other things, a green jobs revolution. That the way out of the economic mess of 2008-9, that threatened a global economic meltdown and catastrophic depression, was to support green technologies, green energy systems, and lead a wave of innovation…
The change two weeks ago by Blink Networks to switch from per-hour pricing to per-kilowatt-hour pricing has caused an eruption of anger among Blink members. The change was supposed to solve another big problem – Blink’s habit of rounding up session fees to the next hour even when the elapsed…
Access to charging stations is a fundamental need for electric vehicle drivers. But does that mean an electric car driver can park in a handicapped spot just to access a charging station? If the charging station is blocked, does that transfer rights to the electric car driver to violate the…
