Bob. The sequel

In the ever changing world we live in there is one essential thing that has existed unchanged for many centuries.....Money.

The image shown here is simply what comes to mind when I hear that word. It is an album cover, for those who don't know, from a band who had a hit song called... 'Money'. But I digress...

Money is the thing we exchange for goods and services. I believe it may have superceded a process called barter. It exists today as a measure of value which can be stored and saved for future use, is supported by government decree and can exist as banknotes or coinage or else as digital balances which are controlled and accessed electronically.

Being a car owner for many years I have always had to use money to pay for the fuel the car's engine needed to burn in order for it to rotate the wheels - the whole purpose of having a car. I have little recollection of those early purchases, most being lost in time, but I am certain that for a significant part of my car-owning life I would have used cash, money in the form of bank notes and coinage. In today's world many transactions are done electronically, typically using a plastic card which communicates with a bank in some mysterious way and reduces one's own digital balance at the same time as increasing someone else's. Strange as it may seem we accept this as perfectly normal so that goods and services can change hands without the need for our wallets to hold wads of banknotes or our pockets to be weighed down with coinage. The fossil fuels needed for burning in those cars can, of course, still be bought with cash if this is what one chooses to use and one of the advantages of money in this form is that it does not rely upon electricity in any way.

Enter the electric car world (in our case, with Bob) and suddenly cash is useless. It cannot be used to buy the electrical energy to put into the car to make those wheels turn simply because the charging locations are unmanned; there is nobody to give the cash to. Invariably these places are situated away from other retail premises and seem to be run by remote national organisations with no local presence. In order to buy the electricity (kilowatts) needed one has to rely upon the electronic wizardry of the modern world to transfer money to someone unknown and unseen. How we do this might be slightly different at every charging location - there seems to be little consistency - but there is another modern invention that can make this process easier. Indeed one might go as far as to say that life with an electric car is inextricably linked to this thing - some would say impossible without it. I am, of course, referring to the mobile phone.

Again, thinking back to my youth, the telephone (as it was then called) was a heavy object made of bakelite (a hard plastic material invented in 1907) with a dial on the top which was rotated using one finger.

The telephone had a single use; it enabled voice communication over any distance. For many people today the device we now call a 'phone' might be only rarely used for voice communications but it has a range of other uses. One of those involves linking wirelessly to the car, especially those like Bob that use electricity to get around. Regardless of where he is, Bob is continuously being monitored by my phone and it seems I can even flash his headlights remotely should I feel this is necessary! Our first attempt at using a public charging point left us confused until another kind electric car owner arrived and advised us to point the phone's camera at a QR code so we could start charging and then pay for the electricity we were putting in the car. The 'phone' is, of course, no longer simply that, any more than the modern day car is simply a way of getting from A to B. Both have become transformed in our modern world by adding functions barely conceivable just a few years ago.

Coming back to Bob, we are still on a steep learning curve as he can do so many additional things that have little to do with him moving us from place to place. Many of these are hard-wired into the car in such a way that they cannot be switched off. The steering column itself has so many mysterious buttons and knobs that there is a genuine risk of touching something whilst driving that can put the whole car at risk. Then there is the display screen (described as the Multimedia System) mounted centrally on the car's dashboard. Given the narrow twisty roads we drive on in our part of Scotland this unnecessary distraction seems a rather bad idea but fortunately it can be switched to 'Standby' mode so that it becomes a simple clock. There is also the slightly smaller screen in front of the driver which has a mind of its own as we discovered when a large message appeared advising us to check the tyre pressures. On doing so, after we arrived home, we discovered them all to be at the correct pressure and it turned out that the system merely wanted us to do this and then confirm we had done it.

There is one thing we can take advantage of on our roads and that is 'Regen', a feature which can come into effect when descending one of our steep hills. If this is switched on then as soon as the right foot is lifted from the accelerator pedal there is a gentle braking sensation which will gradually bring the car to a halt whilst simultaneously converting the kinetic energy into electricity for the battery. The effect is small but there is a sense of satisfaction in knowing the process is happening. Some caution is also needed, however, because when Regen is activated the car's brake lights come on as soon as the driver's foot leaves the accelerator pedal, something that could cause the driver following closely behind to panic. Perhaps the next generation of electric vehicles will have solar panels on the roof and an exercise bike connected to a generator fitted inside so the passengers can keep themselves fit whilst at the same time topping up the battery. (This may not be as weird as it sounds. There are already roads with charging systems built in so that EVs are topped up wirelessly as they move over them.)

On a positive and more serious note, we are pleased to announce that our bikes will fit into the car, folded of course, and we have discovered that unlike in most fossil cars where winding down a window to let in fresh air also brings in a lot of noise (from the engine) in Bob's case there is almost no noise at all. Best of all we can plug him into our home electricity supply and programme a schedule using Bob's Multimedia System so that the charging begins at night when the electricity being provided by our domestic supplier is at a reduced cost. Programming this was not easy, however, despite my reading two different user manuals (each of which has over one hundred pages), but eventually by trial and error we worked it out. All this was to ensure that Bob had enough kilowatt-hours in his battery to take him as far as we needed by morning.

We have no intention of using Bob for longer journeys but we did recently use him for a trip into Glasgow, a distance of over one hundred miles. This highlighted another distinction between ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) and EV cars which is that it is best  for us to establish the mileage to our destination before setting off so that we know whether or not the car will need a top-up charge on the way. A charging stopover needs to be factored into the timetable for the journey - a twenty minute break from driving which can be quite welcome - and this way of thinking was never necessary with an ICE vehicle.

For those long journeys Bob will sit comfortably in his garage at home as we would normally use the buses which pass through our village and these can take us to a train station if needed. Both of these things can take us, plus our bikes, anywhere we want to go without the stress of driving on and fighting the traffic on our busy roads so we think we have made a good move in changing to a small EV. So far we have yet to meet anyone who seems motivated to make a similar change although occasionally we do get the impression that some of our bizarre behavioural traits are admired by others.