Nina's Blog - Sunday 10th July 2022

@turbineman40 It's great. It's the biggest, newest, most expensive, most powerful, and most sophisticated car I have ever bought. Our car had reached the point where it was not sensible to pay to maintain it at about the same time that my wife died. We had set aside a pot of money to buy a boat to use when I retired. But with no one to share it with there was no point and I needed a car. I hate buying cars and I had never had a powerful car so I thought I could solve both problems at the same time by buying a two year old Tesla S 70D. If it all goes well it will be the last car I buy and I get to enjoy a ridiculously quick car while I still have the reflexes and eye sight to handle it.

I've had it four and a half years now and I enjoy driving it more than any other car I have owned. In EV terms it's ancient at seven years old and is about the cheapest Model S that can be bought but it still outperforms almost all mass production unmodified ICE cars.

The range is nominally 330 km/205 miles and as far as I can tell it has not lost any range/ Of course it varies with driving style, wind, temperature, speed, how many hills you climb just as it does for an ICE car. Today on the long run at between 60 and 70 mph without a lot of speed variation it was doing about 280 W-hr per mile

Tesla have positioned chargers all over northern Europe at very roughly 100km intervals so range is rarely a problem. I don't know what the situation is in North America.

And I've left the best bit till last: the car has free supercharging! I've driven 90 thousand kilometres in five years but the two COVID years hardly count, so say 22 thousand km per year. An ICE car in this class probably does about 10 km per litre so that's 2 200 litres of fuel per year that I didn't have to pay for. The average price was about 15 NOK/1.5 USD per litre over those five years so about 33 kNOK/3.3 kUSD per year. If I can keep it going for 15 years the savings will have paid for the car. Assuming Tesla doesn't go bust of course.

Actually that's only the best bit for me. The real best bit is that my car is nowhere near as efficient as newer EVs. Newer versions of the Model S have noticeable better range and the smaller cars are even better. I have friends with other brands of EV (Hyundai, Kia, BMW), they are also very pleased to have one.

Tesla doesn't advertise, Tesla owners do it for them! :-)

@ninalanyon Nina, those are impressive stats on your EV Tesia car. You answered my big question if recharging the car. We don't have the charging stations like you describe . What about the battery life? Are you going to have the batteries with a new set soon?

@ArishMell Thank you! Never been there before. Stopped at Hopwood services. Feeling happy and free. Dressed in a long wraparound skirt and black and red blouse, earrings, lipstick.

@ninalanyon anything other then English and I am lost.

@turbineman40 But if you know a bit about the etymology of English words you can often guess at the meaning of common Romance and Germanic words. Especially if you know how they are pronounced. I'm in the north east of England right now and the local dialect still has traces of the times when the Vikings were in control of the area (Danelaw) . So I can easily hear the connection between the English word boat and the Norwegian båt because here the pronunciation is almost exactly the same as the Norwegian. Similarly for house/hus.

The usual statistic (I think) is that English is derived about 60% from Norman and later French and 40% from mediaeval and later Germanic and Scandinavian languages so if you know English you probably have a chance at recognizing quite a few Western European words.

Of course all this must feel a bit remote, perhaps exotic, to someone in North America where a lot of the connections between languages have been broken and where you can travel in a straight line for a thousand kilometres and not encounter anyone who cannot speak English. Hard to do that in Europe without picking the starting location and direction very, very, carefully. When I set off to visit family I drive nearly 2 000 km and pass through seven countries and eight language areas.

Have I put you to sleep yet? Do tell me if I'm waffling on too much!

@ninalanyon Keep talking please. I an very interested in what you are saying. In my experience I have driving a thousand miles in one fifteen hour driving day. Never left America, drove through seven states, no passports to show, no state lines to check in or out of and no change of languages. Pretty amazing isn't? Almost all hugh speed roads, 70 mph type roads

@turbineman40 About three weeks. But not all in one place. Starting with three nights in Newcastle. Decide tomorrow where next or if I'll stay longer.

@turbineman40 It was a bit tiring; glad I have good cruise control on the car. But I was dressed all the way.
Here's a picture taken at about half way at a shopping centre while the car was charging: