Since purchasing my new 51Ah pack over four years (as per today 4 years, 7 months and 6 days) ago, I’ve been tracking the degradation of the pack’s capacity over time with periodic long-distance full-cycle trips. With one of the first nice and not freezing days in 2021, I thought it would be nice to see how the battery was doing. My pack was purchased in March 2016 and installed August 8, 2016. If you’re interested to know more about how this pack was chosen, got its final size and capacity, please head over here to read all about how […]
Hello 2021!
Whew, what a year…for all of us anywhere. Hope you’re staying safe wherever you are. Good news is that my family and I have been lucky. Healthy throughout the year, we got to travel outside of Switzerland twice to meet friends and family … with TW560 being part of the trip. This entry is a long-ish re-cap of 2020 with some selected photos. TW560’s adventures will follow in retroactive entries later. This year was a very busy one – my company’s fully digital setup and myself being used to be remote all the time when traveling coupled with customers transitioning […]
Not quite 2000km on one charge
A world record with a TWIKE? 2000km on one charge…with a 25+ year old electric vehicle? Wishful thinking or validation of a decades-old vehicle concept? Thomas Bechtiger from Bemoto in Zurich has been our trusted TWIKE repair shop from the very beginning and thought that this would be feasible. He wanted to just load as many used electric scooter batteries into a TWIKE as possible and then see how far the TWIKE could go. It took him and a small and dedicated team months to build the blocks, add a lower-voltage 48V motor and controller electronics to go with it. […]
Want to know more? Start here!
WELCOME! The TWIKE, an electric three-wheeler designed in Switzerland. TWIKE? Three wheeler designed in Switzerland in 1985 Name is short for “TWI“n-bi”KE“ This TWIKE is number 560, built in 2000. New ones are still built today. It has done more than 320’000km Electric range 460km / 75kg lithium batteries Top speed 95 km/h Has been to many places Want to know more? Loads of TWIKE information can be found here. PLEASE send us / share the photos you took of TW560 – thanks! Twitter: @TWIKE_560 Email: pix@emissionless.ch
Pre-TDI2020 battery spa
As always, the time until a major trip seems endless until…the trip is just 2 weeks away and the agenda is still full with calls and meetings and weekends are chock-full with other stuff. Equally important is balancing a pack before setting out on 3 weeks of full-cycle discharges during long-distance daily trips. Thanks to the fact that I have multiple battery workstations, balancing the 42 strings takes only about one day in total and – as mentioned previously – this exercise is also a very good indicator for cell ageing and cell health in general. TW560’s pack is nearing […]
Omnibus update 2018/2019/2020
During the last few days I’ve been publishing ‘old’ entries on my blog and a few readers reached out to me as they were wondering if something was amiss. All is good (…as someone else tweeted regarding something much more serious) – These entries were just overdue and I’m posting them with the correct date for them to show up in the correct order in the timeline as one of my new year resolutions are to post a little more regularly for this blog. Below is a preview of the entries that will be published during the next few weeks. […]
Hello 2020
At the end of 2019, I look back at a very nice and fun-packed year with my favourite of all vehicles: TWIKE 560. 2019 was a very busy year. It saw me travelling around 80% and being away for weeks at a time. Most notable was November where I enjoyed full two weeks in warm Singapore instead of grey and cold Switzerland before flying to Spain for another 9 days. 2019 was also notable as I went on two longer TWIKE adventures TDI2019 to Italy My first long-distance solo TWIKE adventure driving to Austria and onward to central Italy and […]
Pre-TDE2019 balancing
Balancing batteries is an important part of maintaining pack health. Especially with a battery pack that doesn’t have an active cell-level BMS monitoring every cell. TWIKE 560 currently has three 100-cell stacks which all would need an own balancing connection – a BMS would be adding weight, considerable amounts of cabling and complexity to the setup. Furthermore, one of the really neat features of Dreifels‘ DFC 3.0 controller, being able to completely and physically disconnect the battery from the vehicle when not in use and effectively go to zero amps would be rendered useless as the BMS controller is connected […]
TWIKE 5 (…6) update
It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned anything about the development of next-gen TWIKE’s. My TWIKE is a third-generation TWIKE that went into production over 27 years ago and is still in production today! The first version of TWIKE’s were a human powered recumbent bike for two people, capable of sustaining 50 km/h for 50km. One of the first design studies for this vehicle looked like something from a science fiction novel: If you want to buy a new one, you can do so by visiting the website of the current manufacturer Fine Mobile and press the ‘contact us’ […]
Hello 2019!
What a year this has been – completely destroying my vehicle in an accident, fully rebuilding it during 6 months! Very happy to report that all is back to normal and TW560 is a joy to drive again. Haven’t been blogging in a while as my job at a start-up has been taking up most of my time and I’ve been travelling a lot. This is why my kilometre count for this year is – measured against my usual yearly ~25,000 km – is very low. Keep in mind that 7800 km is more than most TWIKEs worldwide do in […]