Every 191000 km…you’d better have a spare ready!

Last week I was driving at 90 km/h on the A1 motorway on my way from and to a next meeting as suddenly TW560 started losing speed. No noise, no grinding, no error messages – just no acceleration. Eventually, after changing the controller display to show raw inverter messages the inverter showed me a F06 error and rebooted gracefully just to show the same error when attempting to accelerate again. As TWIKEs in general roll very well, I didn’t have to leave the right lane immediately. After 3 reboots, I knew that something was definitely wrong. A few hundred metres […]

Battieres: Current status & how to keep them healthy

Batteries: the most important part of an electric vehicle and the most expensive part, too! EV drivers always obsess about remaining capacity (…especially the ones that use their EV for more than just their daily commute) and which external factors can contribute to capacity loss…and what can be done to preserve capacity as much as possible. When speaking to a non-ev-driver, there is much confusion about what exactly capacity is. Car manufacturers make things even more confusing with much electronic nannying and many abstraction layers. Chemical energy storage is a vast field and I could start a full blog covering […]

Season’s greetings & Welcome 2016!

Season’s greetings to everyone & thank you for reading this blog in 2015! emissionless.ch/emissionslos.ch has seen its visitor numbers double in 2015 – I’m humbled by the sheer amounts of people reading my musings and following my adventures! 2015 has been a very good year for TW560: Many one-day / multiple-day trips, an epic pan-European adventure and very few technical issues. 2015 was also a good year for electric mobility: it truly entered mainstream media and the collective mind – not only because of the VW-emissions scandal. 8 years ago, with a TWIKE and a Renault Kangoo Electri’Cité everyone thought […]

A Christmas present from TW560

December 23, I finish work and drive to my Canadian friend’s place to have some pre-christmas drinks. My wife has already arrived. We have snacks and many, many drinks. After midnight, we both get into TW560 and boot DFC30 (DreiFels Controller 3.0) and want to drive home. Within one second, I know something is wrong… The battery warning light (which, under normal circumstances, never, ever, is on for more than a fraction of a second) glows and nothing happens. A few reboots later, my feeling tells me we’re going to go nowhere tonight. As most of the readers of this […]