Carpool Stickers Arrive!

Earlier this month our license plates and clean air vehicle decals arrived from the State of California.  These decals allow us to use the High Occupancy ("carpool") lanes across California with only a single occupant.  We got really spoiled by having these stickers on our Toyota Prius from 2006 to 2011, but eventually the rules were updated and regular hybrid cars no longer qualify for this incentive.  Now only plug-in hybrids (Chevy Volt, new Prius Plug-in Hybrid), fully electric vehicles (Tesla, Nissan Leaf, BMW ActiveE, etc.), and certain other alternate fuel vehicles qualify.  The utility of these stickers depends a lot on individual driving patterns, but there are definitely times in rush hour during our normal commute when the carpool lane is going 20 miles per hour faster than the other lanes, and in such cases it is a huge time saver.

Free Networked Home Charging Station

After 1500 miles without a home charger for our new ActiveE, the installation has at last been completed for our new networked CT-500 ChargePoint charger from ChargePoint America.  From a usability standpoint, the home chargers are even easier to use than the public stations -- there is nothing to scan, just remove the charger from the holster and plug it into the car.  The one button on the device can be used when you want to interrupt a charge in progress.

Notice the cellular antenna on the top right of the device.  One of the key benefits of these higher end charging stations is that they send status information back to ChargePoint so that the status can be viewed through a web portal or through the Charge Point mobile application.

The screenshot below of my ChargePoint dashboard shows my home charger listed in addition to the RFID card I keep on my keychain and use to charge at public charging stations (serial numbers whited out in the screenshot below).  I had to call the contractor to remind them to provision my new unit with ChargePoint and provide my ChargePoint account number to link the new home charger onto my existing account.

The dashboard and mobile app allow me to track charges and total electrical consumption for the car without having to have a separate electrical meter.

My main complaint so far is simply the loud buzzing noise when the unit charges.  This seems to have gotten a little quieter after the first charge, but is still noticeable.  Others have also commented about this in other EV forums.  Next week an inspector will come out to review the installation as part of the permit process (which was completely handled by the contractor), and I will ask about the noise at that time, but it is not any louder than a washing machine, so is not a big problem in any case.

Thank you American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Transportation Electrification Initiative administered by the Department of Energy!

First Month of Experience with ChargePoint

Update 4/6/2012: Thanks to a former colleague who now works at CoulombTech for pointing out a minor error in this post.  The Charge Point cards use RFID rather than barcodes.


We've had our ActiveE for over a month, but still don't have a home charger.  Over the past month we've put over 1300 miles on the car, and have charged exclusively at ChargePoint units at my office and at public charging stations.  To use a ChargePoint charger you first scan a barcode an RFID card to authenticate and then just plug in the standard J1772 connector to the car.  The fact that you scan in each time means that you can track your charging status and history precisely on the ChargePoint website or mobile application.


Some of the older ChargePoint chargers will cause a GFCI hard fault when you first start to charge with an ActiveE.  This is an issue that has been addressed in newer ChargePoint chargers and you can just retry if you ever experience this.  It was disconcerting to see this error on my first attempt to charge the car last month, but every ChargePoint charger includes an 800 number and the technician on the phone was able to monitor the station in real time and advised me to try again until we got it working.
I now find that this GFCI fault occurs in about one attempt out of three or four with an older ChargePoint unit, but it always succeeds on a second try.


Over the last month we've visited 6 different charging stations and consumed 447 kWh with the car.  ChargePoint claims that this is the equivalent of 635 kg of greenhouse gases saved, but that seems way too high so they must be comparing against a very inefficient internal combustion engine car to reach that figure.  This is presumably calculated using the emissions of an average gasoline-powered car and subtracting the emissions generated for the electricity to charge this electric car.

Using the EPA Clean Energy Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator I get a value of 308 kg of CO2 generated for the creation of the 447 kWh of electricity we used.  In my case this is a large overestimate because almost all of our charges have been from Solar powered electricity.  Our primary chargers at work are solar powered, as are the chargers at the Portola Valley Town Center.  The videos below show a bit of the charging infrastructure we've been fortunate enough to use.

Sound System on the ActiveE

Sound system on the ActiveE

The sound system in the ActiveE is similar to any other model year 2011 BMW, but in the interest of providing a complete picture I wanted to do a quick post about what I've experienced with it.  The BMW ActiveE lease has an unusual feature in that it is unlimited mileage.  BMW actually wants us to put as many miles as possible on these cars to help test them.  The unlimited mileage coupled with the fact that the charges are completely free almost everywhere in the Bay Area (I have never charged at home) means that we've been putting a lot of miles on the car going up and down the San Francisco Peninsula and have gotten to know the sound system pretty well on those drives.  Due to the limited nature of this trial, there were no premium sound upgrades available.


There are three main ways I currently listen to music in the car:

• Streaming Pandora Radio over bluetooth from my Android phone.  This works well, but I don't like having to fiddle with the phone to start a playlist or skip songs.
• Using MP3s I've stored in the car's built-in hard drive.  MP3s can be transferred from a connected USB drive in the glove-box, or ripped on demand from CDs that are put into the CD player.  I don't know how much space is on this hard drive, but I've copied over more than 100 MP3s so far into multiple playlists.  The MP3 importing software in the car seems to work pretty well in that I can put MP3s in different folders on a USB drive and they will be accessible through a menu hierarchy representing the directory structure once imported, and the importer is not confused by other non-music files on the USB device.
• The legacy formats such as SiriusXM Satellite Radio, CDs, radio, etc.

The options above work well, but I have a number of minor complaints / observations :

• The display doesn't handle Unicode characters for my MP3 collection.  I put in a couple of MP3s with titles and filenames in Mandarin but they do not display properly on the screen, as you can see from the screenshot below.
• Manually connecting a USB drive into the glove box to transfer MP3 files from my computer is cumbersome, and the car already has a data link anyway.  I'd love to be able to utilize the data link in the car to wirelessly send music from my home computer to the car, or at a minimum to transfer MP3s over Bluetooth.  Integration with Google Music or Amazon MP3 would be even better.
• Playlist management.  I haven't yet successfully copied over playlist files from my music collection to the car, nor have I found out how to setup an on demand playlist, or set a selection of songs to repeat (I have a 3 year old that occasionally insists on such repetition).
• In 2012, streaming internet music services such as Pandroa should be built-in, as they are far more useful than Satellite Radio.  The Toyota Entune software is supposed to offer Pandora in dash for the new Prius, so I would expect at least this much from the more expensive ActiveE.

Has anyone found out yet how large the hard drive is for MP3s?  Any other findings or comments about the sound capabilities of the ActiveE?