Long story short, the smoke escaped from the inverter. At the moment a technician in the Netherlands is poling it with a stick, seeing if it will wake up or at least grumble a little to let us all know it’s still alive.
I had the feeling something was wrong as trying to quantify the eMR2’s performance was like shooting at a moving target; putting more cycles on the batteries didn’t result in more power and warmer temperatures resulted in shorter range.
All I had were memories of the first drive, when the car felt fast, smooth and responsive. Now, as things were supposed to improve, instead acceleration faded quickly, range and top speed were strangely getting worse and sometimes regen felt jerky and occasionally resulted in the check engine light illuminating as the inverter shut down.
Somewhere along the way the DC/DC converter quit and then finally, when pulling away from a stop sign, the car hesitated for a moment and then shut down – this time for good. Not really sure what was going on, I convinced myself that the interface card must have gotten zapped again. $300 and a few weeks later I found that was not the issue as the new card changed nothing and the old card tested out fine.
Clues abounded at the scene of the crime though, as the insides of the converter were rank with the death odor of something electronic, so much so that Victor at MetricMind remarked that the insides of the bag the old interface card was returned in stank.
A long process of dealing with denial ensued as I really didn’t want to miss a local eco-festival after I had already paid $100 for a space to show that car. Yet miss it I did, along with just about every other event I wanted to show the car at this summer. I stopped counting at five.
As it stands the wizards at EVISOL will hopefully have the inverter back to me soon. 2009 can’t wait!
