no shirt, no shoes, no 3G service

The picture above is a bit symptomatic for today’s adventures. We did start the day with a frown because the first leg was 131km. Since I assume everyone here has read every single post on this blog so far, you will know that this is right on the edge for our car. Therefore, we went into maximum eco mode again – not only by keeping it light but also by having our car being dragged behind a big truck. We’re not sure whether that actually makes a difference but it made us more comfortable and we could keep our panic bags stored away for the time being.

While we made it to the Rheinfelden power plant OK, we ended up with 11km of range this time. BTDT, right? A couple of hours of charging and another chat with the CHAdeMO girls to talk them into letting us have half an hour of fast charging brought us up to about 70 km. Meanwhile, we got to tour the hydroelectric power plant.

The next part of the journey, however, was a 99km stint into Switzerland and there was no way we would make it at this point – we were up to around 70km by the time we had to leave. So we picked a charging station on the way and headed there behind yet another truck on the freeway.

But a bit of bad luck was enough to sabotage our plans; the fast charger we had picked was fried and we could not charge. But we only had 7km left! So we came up with a backup plan and went to the nearest Park&Charge station, which – as you might have guessed – was less than 7km away. After an hour of slow charge we had gotten an extra 20km on our range gauge and found another fast charger 24km away in the direction we were heading; arriving with an empty battery wherever we would go seemed to become a habit for today. In any event, we made it and were able to charge with 20kW this time. After 45 minutes, we were over 90% full. What a difference!

(As you can tell from the paragraph above, we have been crunching numbers all day. I apologize if said paragraph does not make much sense to anyone other than us).

The result was that we had missed the program for the whole afternoon and headed off to the final destination to make it just in time for dinner. Unlike the last time this happened, we had pouring rain all afternoon and there were no pictures to be taken. That’s why we are going to feature another car today.

Now before my classic car friends go berzerk when they see this, let me say that it’s based on a replica – which makes sense in many ways, one of them being the fact that the body is fiberglass. This car was built by TURN-E and looks great. We don’t know any specs but sure would like to drive it around town. A few more shots below will close today’s report; as always, remember to check our facebook wall for more pictures of today’s events.