July 1: Flooring it, and more lights, please

I drove it to Burbank airport. Hit speeds of 130 km/hr, or 80 mph with ease. I don't know why I have been reticent to go fast in this thing. If you don't need to conserve battery power there's no reason not to floor it. Top speed is supposed to be 83 mph but it feels like it could go a lot faster than that. Will try top speed when an opportunity arises. Eats up more power at those speeds, though. Hard to tell exactly how much more, since there's no detailed readout of power usage, just the bars on the “fuel” gauge. There is also an analog dial that shows what you are doing at any given moment in your drive. The dial swings to “charge” if you're off the accelerator and the motor is recharging the battery using the kinetic energy of the car rolling to a stop; “eco green” if you're driving in a conservative manner; or a colorless non-eco state if you're flooring it.

My first several drives were done at about 55 mph to conserve energy. No need to do that unless you think you might not be able to recharge quickly.

At the Burbank airport I parked it at my usual parking garage, an off-site facility across the street from the terminal. The site is not set up specifically for EVs, but the guy at the gate pointed me to an outlet. Using my long blue heavy duty extension cord I plugged in, locked it up and headed to my flight, a Mitsubishi trip, ironically. When I get back, assuming someone hasn't stolen the cord, it'll be fully charged and ready to go.

A couple things I would like to see on the production version are:

-- A little light on the charge plug to show it's getting juice. You can look inside on the dash and see a charge light and you can see, at first, the state of charge gauge but I'd like to see a faint green light showing there's juice flowing, followed by maybe an orange light that tells you when the battery is fully charged. This would be so you don't have to go out to the car, open it up, turn on the key and look at the state of charge gauge. My kids' RC cars have that.

-- Cruise control. it would make commuting much easier and might even extend range.

-- A clock somewhere on the dash. Could just be an LCD clock. A temp gauge for the outside air would be nice, too.

-- Left-hand drive! This is coming of course, but driving on the wrong side of the car is a bit awkward, especially at toll booths and parking garages.

By Mark Vaughn