• Rearview camera

    One other unusual feature on the BoltEV is the fact that the rearview mirror can be either a mirror or a video monitor for a rear facing camera.

    A photo is worth a lot of my words.

    You can see how it can also be a mirror, you just flip the lever under the middle to toggle modes. I don’t get any glare at night, so just leave it in camera mode. Why? Because it’s much wider and there are no rear headrests or other blind spots in the video mode.
    Yes, you have to focus on the video, not at infinity, but my eyes are used to that now and I don’t even notice it.

    Love it.


  • Freddy gets a truck (ute)

    Unexpected purchase last night. We bought a Chevy truck – or Ute as you may know it.

    Its dirty, had mice nesting in it and needs some mechanical love, but I drove it home so it’s not all bad.
    It’s a stick shift, Terry has always wanted to learn stick, so it will serve that job nicely.
    2.2 liter inline 4 cylinder, 5 speed tranny. Im told they have long life. This one has 117k on the clock, not too bad for a 1998.

    This means yes, 3 people in our house, 5 cars…. The BMW will go as soon as we can. We hope to post the ad for it this Sunday.
    We will keep Freddys Honda till the Bolt is paid off, then look at something for her.
    Martty will forever be part of the family I suspect, but at least with the addition of the truck Terry will have something to drive when it rains and not leave Freddy at home.
    It also means that I can now pick up as many solar panels as I can afford…. and Freddy finally gets to scratch the truck itch she has had for a long time.


  • Auto High Beam

    Found another interesting feature on the car……
    It has automatic high beam.

    Hit the little ‘A’ button on the stalk and it will look for oncoming cars (if it’s dark enough to require headlights – which it automatically turns on if need be), if there is on, it will dip the lights, if there is nothing for a few seconds, then it turns on the high beam.
    Soon as a car shows up, and I do mean as soon as, it dips.
    My one and only complaint is that I wish it would flip back on as soon as the car goes past, but it takes about 5 seconds to see if there is another car behind it first.
    It gets a little confused in towns, so I just turn it off then, but in all other driving that I have done with it so far (about 2 hours) its been fantastic.

    It is really surprising just how less ‘stress’ there is when driving at night in the country when you don’t have to be flicking the high beam stalk back and forth all the time.
    You can just keep your hands on the wheel and focus on the road…. Keep in mind this is a guy that loves driving and loves driving at night. I would have thought that having less to do would be annoying or somehow taking pleasure away from me, but its not, its just the opposite, I found I was enjoying and more involved in the road without having to keep flipping the stalk. Surprising. In a nice way.


  • Cruise Control

    Sorry. Not sorry to be going on about the car… I just keep finding interesting things that I want to share…..

    Freddy and I did a backroads trip to Borrego Springs and back over the weekend.
    It was our first solid trip with little traffic on a road that we both know pretty well. Once we got out of the canyon it becomes an open winding road in pretty good condition with lots of rolling hills. I could then engage the cruise control and watch it work for the first time.

    Astounded.
    Just blown away with the dead nuts on accuracy of it holding the speed. I mean it was dead nuts on. Not a single mile per hour (1.6ish kph) variation up and down hills or anything else that the countryside threw at us.
    All the cars I have driven that have cruise have never (ever) been that accurate.
    It was just creepy really because the sound does not vary, the car is holding the same speed at all times and so the road and wind noise never changes.
    The car never feels like its braking to hold speed going downhill, the regen just keeps the speed dead on.
    It never feels like it’s accelerating as it has more than enough silent power to hold the speed going uphill.

    Best way to describe it is in Freddy’s words ‘It’s like flying in a hovercraft’….. It really is an odd experience after a little while.
    At first it’s just like, eh, cruise control works, but then you stear and steer and steer and then it starts to sink in, the car has not varied one little bit in any way. Just steer, that’s all there to do.
    Amazing.


  • EMoke

    One of my fond memories growing up as a kid is of a Mini Moke that my Dad bought…. in jars…. someone had pulled apart a Moke with the intent to clean it all up and rebuild it, but lost interest after the pulling apart stage. I seem to recall that we did not pay a lot of money for it, but the experience of ‘helping’ (not sure I actually helped all that much) putting it back together was gold. (Along with learning how to drive it in the sand dunes out the back of our house).

    So, with the last few posts on BB and my love of Mokes explained, I present this timely article of electric Mokes.

    https://electrek.co/2018/10/09/electric-mini-moke-75-mph/

    I love the look of the big one. What a cracker. Very Martty-esk.
    My takeaway is described toward the bottom of this article…. we need a street legal fun EV.
    With weather like we have in Southern California, an electric Moke would be perfect.