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kootenay andrew

Andrew is an environmental engineer by day, "youth activity volunteer" by evening, and EV advocate / blogger in his remaining spare time. He is very passionate about the future of energy generation & usage. He prefers bikes & buses to cars, but acknowledges that Canadian cities have been developed primarily with cars in mind, so if we're going to drive, let's make them all EVs!

Cost update – 3 years and 117,000 km

Time for another electric vehicle (EV) total cost of ownership (TCO) update for my 2014 Nissan Leaf SL.  This is the seventh in a series – the earlier posts can be found at the “Cost Info Posts” page.  I’ve now crossed over 122,500 km at this time of writing, of which I had hit about 117,000 km at the 3 year mark 7 weeks ago.

Read More »Cost update – 3 years and 117,000 km

Chevy Bolt EV: a review from rural BC

A few days ago I had the chance to see a Chevrolet Bolt EV (brand new to Canada, and EPA range of 383 km!), courtesy of Kalawsky Chevrolet here in the Kootenays (in Castlegar, BC).  Terry Klapper is the resident Bolt EV (and Volt) sales guy and he was happy to show me the car’s features and let me take the wheel for a short, but representative, test drive.  (A short drive through town, then across the mighty Columbia River following Highway 3 up the first big hill on the way to the Bombi Summit allowed me to get a sense of town driving, merging, hill climbing, highway speeds, and descending with regen.)

First Bolt in the interior at Kalawsky Chevrolet

Read More »Chevy Bolt EV: a review from rural BC

Day-trip: Nelson to Kaslo and New Denver

Our neck of the woods near Nelson is a really beautiful part of British Columbia.  The roads along the lakes, valleys and over the passes are amazingly scenic.  In an electric vehicle, you can drive a little slower with the windows down and really enjoy the scents and sounds of the mountains, or you can tighten your grip on the wheel and enjoy the instant torque of an EV on our twisty roads (safely of course!)

On this sunny day in June 2016, we travelled along the shores of Kootenay Lake to nearby Kaslo.  After a tour of the SS Moyie and a light lunch (while charging at the local campground), we headed away from the lake, up over the pass and down to New Denver on the shores of Slocan Lake.  We stopped for a short walk in an old cedar/hemlock forest on the way.  My wife and her mom visited the Nikkei Internment Centre while the boys and I played in the park and swam in the lake (the car was charging at the campground while we were doing this).Read More »Day-trip: Nelson to Kaslo and New Denver

Cost update – 96,000 km and 2.5 years

Another ~20,000 km have flown by in the last 6 months and time for another cost update.  If you would like to see where we started in this series of posts, they are linked below:

Lucky 27,777km and February 2015 Cumulative Cost Update; Cost update Feb to April 2015; 50,000 km and cost update; Cost update 63,500 km, Dec 2015 and Cost update 77,777 km and 2 years

Phew!  I’m going to have to stop listing all of them in each blog post.  Moving on…Read More »Cost update – 96,000 km and 2.5 years

Dear Tesla: Suggested features for the Model Y

Dear Tesla Motors:

My family lives in a mountainous region of BC, Canada called the Kootenays.  The venerable Subaru is kind of the unofficial car of our region for a number of good reasons.  We in fact own a 2011 Forester as our 2nd car for all the journeys that our electric Nissan Leaf cannot do.  It has a good AWD system, decent ground clearance, and can traverse any gravel road we encounter on our way to remote lakes and mountain hikes.  In the winter, the AWD and clearance makes the drive to the ski hill a non-event.  And, for a small SUV, it gets decent gas mileage.  However, after driving an EV for a few years, driving the Forester feels archaic.

We would love to replace our Forester with a Model Y in the next few years, and while on a recent road-trip in our Forester, we thought up a list of features we would like to see in your next take on an SUV.

(For blog readers unaware, Tesla will be making a SUV/CUV vehicle after the Model 3, and it will be based on the same platform and called the Model Y; similar to how the X is based on the S platform.)Read More »Dear Tesla: Suggested features for the Model Y