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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.

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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

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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

The New West EV Family Goes to the Great Wolf Lodge

In late March 2016 during spring break, the New West EV Family made the trek south of Olympia, WA to the Great Wolf Lodge all the way from New Westminster, BC. Great Wolf Lodge is a hot and humid indoor water-park and thematic hotel in the middle of no-where Washington state. There are a dozen or more of these monstrosities across the US and this one is perfectly situated, equidistant from Seattle and Portland, for frazzled parents to whisk away their kiddos for some distraction in the middle of the gloomy winters. For us Canadians it was a welcome escape from our cool, damp, and grey winters. We had really wanted to get someplace like Palm Springs or San Diego for some authentic sunshine but since our loonies and toonies don’t go as far these days the artificial tropics of the Great Wolf Lodge was just what we needed and what the pocket book would accept.Read More »The New West EV Family Goes to the Great Wolf Lodge