Lady Elanore

The amazing thing about that extremely expensive and heavy car is it's only a few second slower around the dreaded Nürburgring than the saloon car it's based on! Not that much over 7 1/2 minutes.

I can charge at some service stations, especially if they have budget hotels on-site. Some have Tesla chargers in a different part of the car park, but the ones that are usually near the hotels will do 3.7/7 kW/h slow chargers like mine. Still get dirty looks from EV drivers. Until that stops, I won't be rushing my service station breakfast any time soon.

The thing about a Phev is it maximises it's dino juice (gotta love those dead dinos) when it has charge. Once the charge has gone it starts to regen off the petrol engine occasionally, which is bad for your pocket and also the environment. So to save us all, PHEVs should be allowed to charge too without aggro. The EV part of a PHEV is an integrated and essential part of the car for efficient running. If I am honest, the more aggro I get, the more I am likely to charge at a service station, or similar.

Phev's have it worse in some ways. Nearly all PHEVs that I've come across charge at either 3.7 or 7kW max. So I've a 13 (and a bit) kW/h battery. The last 3kW/h are permanently reserved (I think the heating comes from that reserve too), so the car needs 10kW/h to fully charge and because of, what I assume are the inverter losses and charging not being a 100% efficient procedure, I need around 12.5kW/h to fully charge the car from it's 'flat' condition. Now even if your car has the 32amp charger, it means 2 hours to charge the meagre battery and my car only has the 16amp charger (3.7kW/h) as no 32amp was available at time of purchase, so 4 hours for me. Try justifying that at a service station on the M40, when a plethora of EVs rock up. Basically means I get a PHEV for any outward journey and subsequently, all my local running and return trip are a heavy car lugging around a load of dead batteries. This has meant on occasions things like 200 miles of PHEV and 500 miles of inefficient non-PHEV in a single job.

This is worth a watch. I can't stand Schmee, but gave this a go anyway and it was genuinely quite interesting.

This was a reposted video OOOOPS!

Much as I love Harry's Zagato, especially in that colour, when he had it next to the rally Fulvia, I think I prefer the standard shape. Who am I kidding, i'd be thrilled to bits to own either

Hope your car is feeling better soon. Nice pad, I hope my room and the Kiwi sanctuary have been sorted

My grandad was born in Tantobie

I'd happily go for the Bean Queen.

I love Harrys videos, but can not bring myself to watch a Ferrari SUV-lite one.

Can I have beans on mine as well please

Well now that Olduns Pub Bingo may be about to disappear, I need a new, high stakes, gambling fix.

Oooh a new game. Battery Bingo. Admittedly, there isn't much choice in the answers, but it's a start.

It is the typical Carwow over exaggeration. No official verification and no two-way run. It takes nothing away from the McMurty though. Amazing machine. I can't wait to see what the road car can do, especially on a hot lap around a track (even if it can't make a whole lap of the 'Ring' at max attack).

Funnily enough, I'm halfway through that vid, just paused it to make a cup of tea and noticed you had already posted it up. I like Mike Wheeler and knew he was car daft, but I didn't realise quite how car daft he is. Astonishing!

My Fiat Sedici (SX4) 4x4 diesel was superbly reliable as well as capable in the snow (electronic switch to lock centre diff clutch thingie). Reliable, economical and not a great thing to live with on a cold start, owning to the inability to go into first without graunching until the gearbox had warmed a tad . The interior was incredibly low rent with hard plastics, but there again, nothing fell off or stopped working. As a cheap car, it was unbeatable. I got mine at 6 months old, 4k miles and it was £8K cash, reduced from £16K new. 50% depreciation in 6 months! The previous retired owners, had bought it new, full price and hated the car with a passion almost from the point of getting it home. A Honda garage then sold them a nice Jazz (comfy, soft and light to drive - the correct car for them) but could only offer book for the Fiat. They sold the Fiat for list price they told me, the lady of the retired couple, bursting into tears at the eye watering waste of money the Fiat had instantly become. I bought the car for it's SIV (£8K) and a couple of bottles of whisky - for the salesman and the manager. I was sorry to hear of the couple's plight, but in truth, the Fiat was a great workhorse of a little car, but the market didn't quite pick up on that. I also hope the salesman that sold them the expensive, rattly diesel, 4x4 Fiat, that was not what they really wanted, has a terrible career, He deserves one. I suspect the couple had never driven the diesel version and apparently they didn't know they had a 4x4 either. Shameful sales behaviour.

Another thing that would help the energy crisis and prevent power cuts (and possible issues for EV users?) would be if the plethora of external Christmas lights were bloody well turned off! I love houses needlessly over decorated with Christmas lights and plastic chintz, but this year isn't the year for it and I have never seen as many over decorated houses in my life. Astonishing numbers and they are burning through juice from afternoon until midnight and many stay on right though the night too. Ridiculous. Even though many are LED lights, they still all add up. Bah Humbug! Rant over Disclaimer: I am referring to houses that look like they have been decorated by the Griswolds in the above rant

I realise that's a bit more about energy, but energy is so part and parcel of the EV debate I thought it worth posting in here.

After the latest revelations about changes to Ethereum mining and the massive reduction in its power consumption, a claimed 99.84% no less! (BBC article suggest a greater saving than the power consumption of Ireland or perhaps even Austria!), then things are taking a turn for the better. The article also suggests that the emissions savings are greater than that made by all current EVs!! Now you add in zero emissions fuel such as the stuff Porsche has been playing with and you keep ICE engines on the road, also saving on the massive energy use and emissions created in making new cars, we start to make a positive step forward. It's an interesting article and I'll take it with a pinch of salt, but even if it's only 10% true, it's a positive turn in the right direction. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-63872983

I suppose it was partly my own fault. It asked me if the cars to be locked and put in park mode, which I've never seen before. I now realise it was telling me it was a 'park it up at home and do this', sort of message. It was also around 600mb, so there was quite a bit of stuff integrated into the car. At the same time, my phone's remote operation has been upgraded to match the car's new software and so far seems to be very slick. First time that's happened to me and that with around 10 years of BMW ownership and all those cars being capable of over the air updates. I'm wondering if it's part of the catch-up caused by the chip shortage. It took a few months to get 'Android Auto/Apple car play', after I bought the car and this was because of the chips BMW sourced not having the software/licence for the phone features, at least they didn't at the time of installation. It all woks seamlessly now too, except that update happened in the background as normal.

Soo this is a bit of a first world problem... I was at a petrol station recently and as I exited the car, a notification popped up asking if I wanted to instal new software. This happens quite often on the car and is normally a background operation that doesn't interior with normal operations. So I figured why not, clicked "yes" and started to refill the tank. A few minutes later I jumped back in the car and pressed 'start' Nothing! Tried several times and nothing! Had I bricked the car? Looking at the centre display it said "23%" and I figured I'd just stop the update and move the car to the jet wash where it could carry on installing the mystery software. Nope! That doesn't work, can't cancel the update. What!!!??? After a couple more minutes of fiddling around I returned to the cashier with my head hung low and declared "the car at pump number 5 will be there for the next 20 minutes or so and won't start until it's finished its software update". I got a look of 'well it's a BMW isn't it!' and a few people rolled their eyes at me. I laughed, partly out of embarrassment and partly at the absurdity of the situation. Around 20 minutes later (I'd guessed about right) the car fired up as usual and I was back to normal....or least mostly back to normal, as many of the settings I had installed had been reset to default.

Morning

For something that is mainly a solid state thing, I was surprised at the sheer numbers of failures, but I suppose when you think that it might be the "handshake" somewhere in the system that is at fault, then that doesn't surprise me so much. The gear I use at work, constantly fails at handshaking (don't get me started on the Cisco switchers they have us rig - "switch them off then on again!") and even my home entertainment 'exchange' (it looks like a GPO exchange from the 50s) fails at its handshakes on a daily basis. Still, these failures of charge points shouldn't be as permanent and commonplace as they seem.