Electric cars

The French have been the forerunners in this field in the past, having made commercially electric versions of the Renault 5, Citroen AX & Peugeot 205 long before the Prius raised its pious head!

My first introduction to electric cars came when a friend bought an electric Peugeot Partner van at an army surplus auction because it only had few hundred ks on the clock. He could not get it to go, though, so, after a year I brought it home & soon had it charging nicely! This prompted me to buy an electric Clio which was quite expensive to buy but great fun to drive - in a car park one has to use the horn alot as no-one hears you approach! I eventually put it on UK eBay as I thought it would sell well in central London but to my surprise it was bought by a Portugese!

I replaced this with a Peugeot 106 but discovered the big problem - the traction batteries were generally leased so that when the car was sold, the batteries get returned to the manufacturer, despite the fact that the life of the batteries had hardly been touched & were not available second hand, or rarely so, making the batteries expensive & rare. I never found a set for my 106 & eventuall sold it.

I was in a scrap yard the other day where they alsy sell crashed repairables & managed to take a look round. I discovered a Citroen Berlingo electrique which had rear end damage & had been written off. The batteries had been written off with it despite not being damaged. The price asked for the wreck was far less than the value of the batteries & electric parts ( if you know where to sell them) so I am now the proud owner of a bent Berlingo. The only question is do I sell the bits or buy another Berlingo Electrique without batteries?

A quick update…
Put the Blingo on the ramp to look at the damage from underneath & found that the damageto the rear was restricted to the area to the rear of the back axle, & a day spent with the Portapower & a large hammer saw most of the damage reversed! Most of the bent metal is hidden by the rear bumper & the axle mounts have not moved. This coupled with the fact that I got the carte gris with the van means that as soon as I complete the repairs (front bumper, door morror) I can get a CT on it & as it costs about 1 euro to do 100 kms I will use it. With fuel costing what it does at the moment it makes sense. Otherwise my cooking oil processing plant will run out of used cooking oil. Roll on the tourist season!