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| Old world new new technology: The Stillwater General Store is still the Post Office for Stillwater and has the residents PO Boxes inside. It also used to be the towns only gas station. |
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| A typical day in NYC |
BMW will tell you their electric cars are best for city use, where short trips and low speeds allow a car with about 100 miles of range to perform the duties needed by most city dwellers. I agree to an extent with that because people that live in big cities usually don't travel very far from their residence to go to places like work, shopping and entertainment venues. But...
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| Parked at the Delaware Water Gap |
I live in a rural community in Northwest New Jersey and have been driving BMW's Electric MINI-E and ActiveE now for four years and during that time I've driven in all kinds of environments. I have a good mixture of highway, city and rural road driving nearly every day and take the car to New York City all the time. Sure it performs very well in the stop and go traffic of Manhattan. Driving stoplight to stoplight and using the regen to do most of your braking does help extend the cars range. However the quietness and smooth driving experience nearly gets lost in the intense environment of the city. With all the horns beeping, sirens blaring, whistles blowing and construction crews drilling, there is so much noise the car's silence gets drowned out! Plus there's potholes that can swallow you up and steel construction plates on nearly every street that you are constantly driving over so you can't even really enjoy the smooth, vibration-less electric drive.
That's way I love driving my EV's on the rural roads of Northern New Jersey. It's just you, the trees and the road. In this environment you can really appreciate the smooth, quiet driving experience. On some nights I leave work very late at night and once I get close to home I'm the only car on the road. If it's warm enough I love to turn the radio off and open the windows because all I can hear are the crickets as I quietly roll down the roads towards my house. It's so relaxing that it helps relieve any the stress I may have built up during the day and puts me in a good state of mind. On weekends my wife and I like to just get in the car and drive West towards Pennsylvania. We've
cruised through the Delaware Water Gap a few times and stumbled upon some cool places in many of the small rural communities of New Jersey near the Pennsylvania border.
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| My MINI-E was a great "country car" also |
Driving an EV on rural roads with no other cars around is just fantastic. When you roll the windows down you don't have any noise pollution like what you hear in the city. It's just the faint sound of your tires rolling on the pavement and whatever nature has in store for you. It could be some birds chirping or the noise of the water in a stream rushing over the rocks, but whatever you hear, it beats the sound of pistons pumping and mufflers rattling, I can assure you of that. So the automakers can say they know what's the best use for electric cars all they want, it doesn't mean we have to listen, right?
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| Another view of the Stillwater General Store |
