gemini://mederle.de/b/17-going-electric.gmi

I'm a gearhead. I grew up in and around cars, my grandparents and parents had a Citroën dealership. Before I studied Computational Linguistics, I did a three-year apprenticeship for automobile technician, and I still consider it one of the best times of my life.

Once in my life, I wanted to buy a new car, and in my late thirties I made that dream come true and bought the last big Citroën with their famed hydropneumatic suspension, a C6 sedan. One of only 3,000 made. I've had it for eleven years now, it still looks as beautiful as when it drove out of the showroom, only these days it's not only sleek, but downright petite in comparison with the SUV craze on our streets. As it was basically already a classic when it rolled off the factory line, I've treated it accordingly. I don't like to take it out when streets are salted, and I basically only use it for long-distance travel. Getting an electric car doesn't make sense for me at this time. My car parks for months at a time, and then I do 600 kilometers on a weekend.

Ever since I got myself a cargo e-bike, the C6 does no inner city driving anymore at all, unless there is no way around it. I wish Munich were more bike-friendly, it makes so much more sense to use a bike in the city, and with a pedelec it's neither physically demanding nor any slower than driving a can. My Radwagon easily carries a Saturday family grocery haul. And I prefer it over my motorbikes because I can ride through parks.

I'd love to have an electric motorcycle for touring, but we're not there yet. They are still too expensive for too little range. I don't enjoy Saturday afternoon joyrides that much, I like to do trips and go camping. It's possible:

My usual trips have a destination, and there are recurring destinations. Riding is much more fun on backroads, and that means going through many villages repeatedly. I sold my Harley because I did not want villagers along my route to suffer the noise, and I would love to have a basically quiet motorcycle that gets its energy from the sun.

But as Marc's UK tour shows, it's riddled with problems still, and it's not only the time to wait for recharging, but commercial charging networks that force one to register in a proprietary app for each service, and even then it's not guaranteed to work, apparently because of software issues. By the time this is fixed, I might be too old to still enjoy riding.

Going Electric