Before leaving the house today, I took the garage opener out of my car and put it into the CitiCar since that’s the only vehicle I park in the garage now, and it saves brakes and battery by avoiding a trip of walking into the house to close the door once I exit the garage.

I was ready to go, but nothing happened when pressing the accelerator. The contactor was engaged. I tried engaging/disengaging the parking break. The shift switch was in reverse. I looked at the wires that I fixed yesterday and everything was connected. I then realized that I hadn’t attached the throttle rod back onto the cam when I was installing the pot box throttle. Reattaching the rod, I was ready to go.

I was feeling even more emboldened today after making it to the dog park yesterday in the CitiCar. I even decided to take the steeper hill out of the subdivision, but soon realized it wasn’t as steep as I had thought, and it was shorter. I’ll be taking that “short cut” out of the subdivision more often now. I decided to put the car to the limit and drive the loop to Mc Donald’s and back.

Public Charging

We took a stop at Gertrude park along the way, parking close to the entrance this time to reduce the power consumption. I’m often parking closer to entrances and walking further to consume less energy.

I saw someone had plugged in their laptop the other day at one of the pavilions. Just before we left, I decided to give it a go and charge up. We were already at 80% charge, so the charge would have been fairly slow in the absorption/equalization stage.

Teddy and I sat by Happy Creek for a little while. He would wade around, drink some water, and just lay down enjoying the light breeze and watching people. I walked over and read the Kill A Watt meter. We only consumed 0.2¢ – about 1/15th of a mile added.

Mc Donald’s

We took off and zipped along, coasting when we could, avoiding the use of brakes, and using gravity and the lack of traffic to our advantage.

The drive-through at Mc Donald’s was so long that there was barely enough space for the CitiCar to queue at the end without blocking traffic. After picking up our food, we were able to make a sharp enough turn into the parking lot without having to loop around the building like most people and avoided waiting for an opening going through the drive-through line.

The ride home was the same as usual. No one was behind us for the most part, so we were able to coast often. We took the longer hill back home since it doesn’t have a stop sign at the bottom of the hill, and I have a goal of coasting home without pressing the throttle once I start going down. I haven’t made it yet, but I’ve come very close.

Odometer Readings

At the end, I looked at the odometer and saw that the trip was only 8.5 miles. A previous trip this way registered as 9.5 miles on the old (inaccurate) speedometer, and that didn’t include the stop at Gertrude and the additional length of a full loop rather than back-tracking via the shortest path. Mapping out the trips on Google maps, the GPS speedometer is under-reporting by 0.3 miles while the original speedometer was over-reporting by 0.9 miles.

Trip	Odometer	Type	Google
Custard Package Drop-Off	9.5 miles	Eddy Current	8.6 miles
Gertrude McDonalds	8.5 miles	GPS	8.8 miles

New Record

After the batteries reached a full charge, the energy consumption was the lowest recorded at only 233 watt hours per mile.