Greetings from Norway

[KarlNorway]

Hi all.

My name is Karl Krisitan Markman, Im an electronics engineer working with testing. Hobby developer, soon to be EV driver. (as of 17. July).

I live in the southern part of Norway, about 180 km south west of our capitol Oslo, in a small town called Stavern. Im interest in renewable energy ( I think Alternative is the wrong word) has grown as I have gotten older ( Im only 33 years of age).

I am currently workinig on A EVSE cable that will use a PIC controller and have tha ability to change between 10 and 16 amp current.

Hoping that I can contribute in various ways and help people here.

[johnf]

Greetings Karl

You have landed among a bunch of hard nosed real people who actually do something

good to see that you are getting into renewable energy.
I myself is wanting to get into an Electric car such as the volt so I can charge from home / or work but these are not available here yet in NZ ---later this year for the Volt from GM. We do have the Prius but these do not enthuse me much.
I think it may be a year or two before I buy as the Volt will hit here @ around US$60K --a bit much.
I'll wait for the hype to die down and maybe buy a near new one from some disenchanted buyer.

enjoy the Forum

[Doug Coulter]

You have landed among a bunch of hard nosed real people who actually do something

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Yep - for members, we're mostly not the spectators, but the actual doers who are pretty darn actualized. John being one of the better of us. We're not watching and eating the popcorn, we're putting on the show here. Or trying to. We like doing things that make others -

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Because we can - and so could many of them if they got off their butts.

One purpose of this board is to allow the establishment of what a patent lawyer would call "prior art" or in other words, prove who did something first. The other purpose is to troll for any real talent out there, and form this nice virtual network of pros to help one another - a lot of that is going on here via private messaging for example. It' makes each of us more effective and more valuable to employers and society at large.

And of course, there's this alt energy thing. And fun stuff with charged particles, and instrumentation, and theory and trade secrets and and and....

John, unless the NZ dollar tanks badly, the Volt (Or ampera if that's what they send) won't be that high - they are going down in price here. Mine, fully loaded and "no deals cut" was $42k, before a 7.5k tax rebate, so was really about half the price you're guessing. I don't own a prius, but have driven one, and I can really understand why you wouldn't be that enthused. Noisy, not very good looking, doesn't handle great, anemic power - it's a pure "how economical can we make a car" kind of car. The Volt instead was a "we're going bankrupt and need some really good new product, bet the company" car. It really shows in the result. This was confirmed by letting a prius owner drive it - now he's getting one for himself and trying to find someone to buy his prius.

There's a lot of interesting confluence in parts selection - a great big part of the car - the suspension and steering gear - are shared with BMW's and Audis...interesting - and that's kind of what the car drives like, midband German goodies. With the almost 50:50 weight distribution and the insanely low CG, this is a real sports car (well, if it had 50 more hp anyway). However, with the power it's got - I was able to easily and repeatedly just dust off one of those ricer racers (you know, the guys who take the muffler off a mitsubishi and put a wing on the back and think they're in Fast and Furious Tokyo drift movies). Ok, I've been driving this moderately treacherous twisty mountain road for probably longer than that guy has been alive, and we know what counts in those things - ability - but the car really did not let me down one bit. I just kept letting him catch back up so I could do it again, though with a lot less noise and tire squealing than he appeared to require...and it didn't even hurt my pure-electric range too much over what I get when "hypermiling". Basically only about 15% over the course of a 13.5 mile hot ride.

[KarlNorway]

Waht is the pure El range on the Volt/Ampera ( opel is main GM brand in Norway so Ampera from now on) Im curios as Opel is really pushing it hard here.

[Steven Sesselmann]

Hei Karl,

Welcome to the forum, I am sure you will find it interesting. Your English is of course perfect, but should you want to express yourself in Norwegian I might just be able to help, as I grew up in Oslo. I now live in Sydney Australia and got involved with putting atoms together, almost 10 years ago.

Steven Sesselmann

http://www.beeresearch.com.au

[Doug Coulter]

Pure electric range varies. I recently joined the '50 mile club'. Like with gasoline, it depends on how hard you drive the thing. Other factors include temperature - the battery works better when it's warm. There's some thermal management stuff (a lot) but it uses some power too, so in the warm weather you get the most range. The heater draws a lot in winter - I've worked up a kludge that gets around most of it, but the electric heater draws ~6kw and heats the engine coolant loop (the out of doors) which is stupid. I added an inverter to the 12v system to just run a small ceramic space heater. It's the big weak link in the original design, but that fixes it right up.