Trip to Goa on Kona EV

On 26th December 2020, I started a road trip from Mumbai to Goa and returned a few days later. I drove a Kona EV, which worked flawlessly and it was absolutely joyful trip.

Charging

We charged the car at Pune and Kolhapur. In the onward journey, we fast charged using TATA power network charger at Tata Motors Cars Service Centre – Bafna Motors, Tathawade. When we arrived, we had to wait for thirty minutes for another car to finish charging. Afterwards, we could not activate the charger via Tata App. The security staff at the service center overrode the charger controls and activated the charger. Our Kona was charged at the rate of 20Kw. We had to stop for one hour to charge up to 94%. Meanwhile, we had lunch at a near by Subway. We drove to Kolhapur immediately afterwards. We arrived at the next fast charger at 6pm with 30% charge. It is located in MG showroom in, Shiroli. We plugged our car for 1 hour and brought the car at 80% SOC. Here, TATA app worked flawlessly.

Charging at MG Motors, Shiroli, Kolhapur

We camped in Kolhapur for overnight in a hotel, which happily allowed me to charge for the next 20% using Kona portable charger. I managed to charge to 100%. We started again in the morning and arrived at Goa Grand Hyatt by 1pm. Again the resort allowed me to charge. They had electric buggies. So they had parking places to charge vehicles. During my whole stay, their security kept interrupting me for going to the charging spot, since guests are not allowed to see the underbelly of the resort. We did tourism for a couple of days. We had comfortable time in Goa without thinking about the range anxiety.

In our return trip, we started with 100% SOC in the afternoon. We arrived at Kolhapur by dinner time and decided to charge slowly at the hotel. While we slept, the car was charged to 95% in thirteen hours. We launched towards Pune and reached there at noon with 26% SOC. We charged at Croma, Aundh charger of TATA. The parking next to the charger was nicely reserved. The app and charger worked flawlessly.

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  Charging spot at Croma, Aundh, Pune

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  Car being charged

We charged up to 93% SOC and left for Mumbai.

Range

Our drive segments were as follows

• Mumbai-Pune 140Kms (1+ hour break before next segment)
• Pune-Kolhapur 245Kms (overnight stay)
• Kolhapur-Goa via Amboli 210Kms

Kona gave mileage of about 9.0-9.5km/kwh on the highway. I only overtake slow moving trucks and keep my speed around 80km/h. If one does aggressive driving the mileage can fall below 8km/kwh. Since the car has 39.2kwh battery, the above distances could be covered comfortably. Additionally, one needs to worry about the ghats in Mumbai-Goa trip, since Mumbai and Goa are at sea level, and Kolhapur and Pune are at elevated position. We had ghat climb/descent in Mumbai-Pune and Kolhapur-Goa segments. The ghats have about 700m elevation difference, which is gained in about 20km drive distance. We observed that on the ghats the car mileage dropped to 3km/kwh. If we calculate, we find that in climbing ghat we loose about 40-50kms of extra range, which is significant in planning a trip. On the other hand descent on the ghat is free and we gain charge of 6kms. On descent, we gain boost of 20-25kms of range. We observed similar numbers in both the ghats in Mumbai-Pune and Kolhapur-Goa. Cars such as Nexon EV, which has shorter range, needs to be extra careful before planning such trips. It would be great to see the equivalent numbers for Nexon.

BMS update

There had been Battery software update recall in Kona, which was applied to our car on 2nd December. There had been reports of Konas being bricked after the update. There was no issue in my car. It has been working without any error message. We fast charged three times during the trip without any issues.

Charging networks

The thing to notice is that Hyundai is not supporting charging infrastructure. I had called Hyundai before the trip and asked for charging at Hyundai dealerships as backups for the above plan. Hyundai ignored my requests and I never received positive callbacks. It is clear that TATA and MG motors are collaborating in building the charging network. It appears that Hyundai is unfortunately missing from this effort.

I am very thankful to TATA for setting up the charging network and allowing all cars to be charged there. They are currently running the charging for free, which I think it is a bad idea. They should charge appropriately for their services. (Update March 2021: now TATA chargers are paid!) I would prefer paid reliable service than free “bhagwan bharose” service. TATA app has some issues for example it showed a free charger busy, and estimated wrong charging time in the app while the charger showed the correct value.

Iran provocation

US is doing everything to provoke a war. Claiming unspecified aggression by Iran! Applying crippling economic sanctions! Sending strike force! And, talking about ground invasion!

We already knew that US politics has gone nuts. Most dire consequence of the downfall of the US politics has been pulling out of the climate change treaty. Now worst is about to happen!

US may start a war with Iran!

I am not sure what US planners think when they decide to attack some country. Do they think they would truly save Iran? It has been abundantly clear that a foreign power rarely succeed in saving a country, while the foreign power has no interest in supporting a non-corrupt stable government and is mostly worried about minimizing the cost of war in terms of money and soldiers.

Most likely they do not care about stable Iran. They are thinking strategically. They want to knock out a major antagonistic regional power. The planning is driven by a clutch of power centers that are eying unchallenged domination in the middle east.

If this continues, a lot of suffering ahead.

I wonder what Chinese planners think. Does it worry them that US is attacking something without being attacked and there is not much benefit to the US?

Three years of E2O: maintenance nightmare

Now I have been driving E2O electric car for three years. In three years, I have done 17K without any problems in drive train. Car is very smooth to drive and predictable battery performance. No noticeable decay in battery capacity. However, the build of the car is very poor. I have had plenty of small issues and resolving them have become my weekend pass time.

The braking system has failed two times and doors have failed at three occasions. A few plastic panels have been broken. The back seat latch has failed. AC has failed. Several electrical systems like horn, break lights, left-right signaling, head light, car locking, and electronic key have failed. Car navigation system almost finds nothing in the city and after an update keep prompting a massage repeatedly. The radio can not be permanently turned off. It turns on again when car is restarted.  Almost all subsystems have failed one time or another. Besides drive train, I can not think of anything that has worked for last three years reliably (read update!!).

On top of that, they do not store spare parts in Mumbai. Each time something breaks, they have to get it from Bangalore. It can take up to several weeks for the parts to reach Mumbai. I drove my car without AC for about a month.

I am not sure if the other e2o owners had the similar experience. Anecdotally, I have heard several similar stories.

Please do not get me wrong. I am a big supporter of electric cars. I love my E2O. The experience is like having an abusive spouse. Now, I am hoping to use the car for about two more years and dump the car as soon as some non-Mahindra enters in the market with a good electric car.

Leaf please come to India!!!

Update (2018-02-23): Now battery of the car has failed. The car is expected to be in the workshop for two weeks for diagnostics and no promise when the car will be back.

Driving to Pune from Mumbai on e2o

I have a 2015 2-door e2o, which has been driven about 15,000 kms. I live in Colaba, Mumbai. I decided last weekend to drive the vehicle to Hinjewadi, Pune. The drive is about 159 kms long. My car only goes about 120 kms in a single charge and I trust it only for 90kms. I would need to charge the car somewhere. Thanks to plugin India community! They have mapped out the location of places that allow public charging. They are supported by the manufacturer,  community members, and private businesses.

I chose two charging spots for my trip G3 moters, Navi mumbai and Trinetra Petrol pump, Lonavala. Both are conveniently located close to the Mumbai Pune highway. G3 Moters has free charging for e2o and Trinetra charges Rs 75 per hour. The first occurs after 37kms, the second occurs after 67kms, and the last segment was about 55 kms.

I was very much afraid of running out of charge. I drove conservatively without AC. In most of the drive, I maintained “2 bars of efficiency (a measure on e2o display)” and about 60 km/hr. I started at 8:30am and reached G3 Moters by 9:30am with 70% charge. I had to wait for 1.5 hours to charge my car to get back to 100%, since e2o charges 20% per hour. But I lost patience after 92% of charge and left.

The next leg was the hard part. The first 45 kms is almost flat road and the last 20 kms is uphill, known as Ghats. I managed to reach to the start of Ghats with above 65% charge. During climbing of the Ghats, the car slowed down to 40 km/hr if I maintained the efficiency level. However, I had to maintain the speed of 60kmph to keep up with the traffic around me. Therefore, not efficient driving. By the time I reached to Trinetra petrol pump, it was 12 o’clock and only 45% charge was left.

For the next leg, I only needed the charge for 55 kms. But, I was not sure about the rest of the terrain. I decided to charge the car for 2:30 hours. I had lunch in a near by food mart, which was a bit difficult to reach by foot. I walked back about half an hour later and still 2 hours to kill. The owner of the patrol pump got interested in the car and kept asking me about feasibility of electric cars. The conversation lasted 1 hour and for rest of the time I waited in the car. I started driving again at 14:30 with 80% charge.  Thankfully, the rest of drive is almost flat or somewhat downhill.  I reached my destination by 15:40. The drive took me 7 hours, which usually takes 3+ hours.

I was visiting a company (not sure if they would like to be named). I reached to their campus and had requested for a charging point beforehand. They were more than happy to help and allowed me to charge my car there. I visited them for 3 days and charged at their place everyday. On the last day of the visit to Pune, I was visiting a research institute. They seemed to be baffled by the electric car. For a while no one was sure, if they should allow me to charge. The matter went to their head of engineering. He raised the issue of cost of charging the car, which is about Rs. 25. 🙂 We finally went to their head of operations (Registrar). He seemed to annoyed by me and said go charge anywhere if you can connect your car. Just do not ask for permissions. We finally found a charging point in a laundry room close to a road. I managed to charge the car.

Next day, I drove back to Mumbai. Now I knew the road and started at 7am. The plan was to charge at same two locations. The first 55kms was happily done and reached to Trinetra petrol pump with 59% charge. I had breakfast at the same food mart and charged the car upto 80% in an hour. I started going downhill on the Ghats and realized that I am spending no energy in driving. In fact, the car was charging due to the regenerative charging. I used only 2% charge in crossing the 20km-long Ghat segment. The rest of 47km also went smoothly and reached G3 Moters by 10:30 with 50% charge and 37kms more to go. I charged the car for 30mins and started driving in the thick traffic of Mumbai. I reached home by 12:30. It took me 5+ hours to complete the drive.

In short, it is feasible to do outstation drive on electric cars, but one needs to have patience to wait for 1hour per 30kms driven. The new version of e2o allows fast charging. It may be charged about 5 times faster using a special charger. It my reduce waiting time/driving time significantly. However, no such chargers are yet installed on the highways in India. My personal opinion is that if a car can be driven about 250kms per charge with AC, and recharged within 30-40mins. It is perfect for outstation use.

MTNL ad insertions

I have been noticing ad insertions by MTNL in Mumbai area for past few months. The ads occasionally appear in arbitrary web pages. For example, here is an MTNL inserted ad at BBC website.

This is annoying and comes on the way of browsing. I wondered how are they doing this insertion. After some digging in the source code I found that their method is very sinister. They are hijacking Google’s ad generating code and placing their own code.

Various websites display ads using the ad service of Google. They place some code of Google on their website and the code generates the ads on the webpages. The code usually depends on some standard Google libraries. Therefore, the webpages also fetch the library code from Google servers. For example, the following code that manages Google publisher tagging.

http://www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js

MTNL code insertion is interfering with this mechanism. Sometimes when MTNL insert the ads, MTNL does not deliver the original gpt.js to the browser instead it sends its own gpt.js (exact mechanism is not clear to me. Possible theories, dns manipulation or sending redirection message).

Here is the gpt.js that MTNL delivered in the above example, which has the code that inserts the ads.

I suppose google should be quite unhappy.

This sounds very unfair practice by MTNL.

I have observed that they have replaced scripts of other web services too.

E2O in Mumbai

Last week, I bought an E2O, a made in India electric car. Before getting into a user review. Let me discuss the buying process. Buying the car has two key hurdles.

First, stiff resistance from family and friends.  Many car lovers challenge the idea of electric car. They will declare that this car is not for them or anyone because electric car comes with distance limitation. Some claim the car is not green, at the end of the day it will be less green then a patrol car, and economics also does not work. Some say your car is a coal driven car, because most of the electricity in India comes from coal. Some experienced car users call it “dibba”, it does not work, and It is too expensive. Some worry if this car has enough “power” to do all the heavy lifting they need.

Second, charging facility even at your own parking space, if you are lucky enough to have a dedicated parking space in Mumbai. I live in a government colony inhabited by enlightened people. I had to make a special request for a parking spot with charging station. Initially, my request was taken with pleasant and shocking surprise. However, I received the permission with in two months. Since the parking space is in semi-open area, installing a safe and secure changing station was a problem that I had to solve it myself.

Buying the car from a dealer was also not trivial. I had to call various showrooms in order to get in touch with the sales person who deals with and knows about E2O. After then process was smooth, I liked the test drive and booked the car. After the booking, I received the car in less than 2 weeks.

User Review

Little disclaimer: This is my first car. I have no reference to compare it with. I am also a new driver.

Looks: Interior and build of the car seems to be of reasonable quality. External panels are made of plastic, due to weight saving reasons.

Drivablity: Car is automatic with power steering, it is very easy to drive. Press the on button, forward gear, and you go. 50-55Km/h is a comfortable speed to drive. Max speed is 85 as promised. Sometimes pick up feels slow. But there is a boost mode in the car, which I have not tested long enough to report my experience. After a single full charge, I have driven 80km with AC on in light traffic conditions. In the trip, I went to Navi mumbai from South mumbai and back. After 80km, the charge dropped from 100% to 37% and car was saying that it can still go for 35km. It seems car can deliver 120KM as promised. I do not feel like testing to the limit. 🙂

Cost: Car costs  6.2 lakhs(T2 version) + 1.8Lakhs(5 year battery insurance). The 1.8 lakhs to be paid out in 3k installments per month. In total the car costs, 8 lakhs. Why this 1.8lakhs? The company forces you to buy this “battery insurance”. This insurance says that if battery goes bad before 5 years then they will replace it. Essentially, they are forcing you to buy two batteries. I hope my battery goes bad before 5 years but not in 5 years and 1 day. 🙂

Running cost: I can not comment yet on maintenance. That is yet to be seen. What about millage? I am experiencing 8KM/unit, that means, I can drive 7.5KM with 1 kwh of electricity. In terms of money, Rs. 1 /km (electricity rate : Rs 7/unit). A petrol car costs 5-6 rs/km. For another comparison, a typical AC probably consumes 4-5 units over night. Probably, the car will not add a massive cost in my electric bill. It seems the electronics of the car is not well optimized. In stand by, the car loses 2-3% charge overnight. This can be a significant overhead if the car is not used regularly.

I will extend this post after more experience with the car. Please post comments if you want me to report on some specific aspects of the car.

Is E2O green?

I have no idea. It depends on two factors. How green is the battery? And, how green is the electricity of India? I will write more as I will gather more information.

Economics of E2O

I think economics of the car does not work. In the long run, the car will be more expensive than a petrol car.  Probably there is no second hand market. I hope one day it will be cheaper.

Sad times

1. Anand lost his reign
2. Sachin retired
3. Tehelka blew into pieces

Sad times indeed!

Why publishers?

This year I participated in organization of a computer science conference. To my surprise, I found that conferences hire publishers instead of publishers own the conferences. Here is how organization of a usual CS conference works.

A conference is defined by its steering committee, which is a small group of top academics from the field of the conference. The steering committee appoints program chairs every year. The program chairs of a year sign a contract with a publisher to publish the conference proceedings. These contracts are signed every year. The program chairs organize the conference independently of the publishers.  They appoint the program committee with the approval of steering committee. The program committee reviews the submitted papers and accepts a subset of the papers. The program chairs send these accepted papers to the publisher for final printing. The copyright of the papers are held by the publisher in return of providing the publishing service for free.  They also give some free copies of published books to the program chairs. The copyright allows them to charge exuberant amount of money to the academic institutions to access the publications.

The natural question comes to mind: “Why publishers exist?”.

One may argue the following three contributions of the publishers.

1. Quality Publishing: The publishers proof read the papers. Sometimes they  move around figures to pretty-up the paper. This task is usually done by some third party company located in some third-world country. They assign ISBN number etc to give the proceedings a unique identifier. And finally, they publish the physical books. Publishers do not make any editorial decisions.
2. Reliable Dissemination: These proceedings are usually available at the publishers website for rest of the eternity. For Academic libraries, it is easy to follow these publishers to find most of the scientific literature. Publishers make dissemination of scientific works easy.
3. Legacy Reputation: If publisher signs publishing contracts  only with high quality conferences then they build a reputation over time. There are no lack of conferences in academia. Academics keep inventing conferences to promote themselves. But if the proceedings of a conference is published by a publisher then the conference inherits the reputation of the publisher.

The first two contribution are already obsolete. The proof-reading service can be provided without the publisher. Usually, the cost of doing research is very high and hiring a proof-reader should only be marginal. An institution can easily pay for proof-reading of its papers by those third world companies. The printing of physical books and hosting the papers on internet are fast becoming inexpensive technology.  The cost of running a scientific publication website can easily be covered by scientific funding agencies. Anyway, they are paying for producing the content. Why not they also pay for dissemination?

The reputation of a publisher is the only reason, I think, that keeps them in business. While evaluating a published work, funding agencies factor in reputation of the publisher. This makes life of evaluators easy. Therefore, the steering committees of the  conferences do not want to move away from reputed publishers. This is hardly a compelling reason to have publishers. This is a classic legacy systems problem.

The underlying technology for publishing scientific works has shifted sufficiently that makes “the publishers” irrelevant and unnecessary overhead. All the scientists I have spoken to also say that they do not see any value of having publishers. However, it is very hard to chart a path from current system to a publisher-free system, without breaking scientific reputation system. Here is a great opportunity for innovations. I am very sure soon scientists will start experimenting with different publishing models for important conferences.

A list of Indian grocery stores in Vienna, Austria

[UPDATE: the info on this post is getting old. address of some shops have changed. Look at comment section for corrections]

In last 1+ year, I have discovered the following Indian stores in Vienna. When I came to live in Vienna, I had a hard time in locating them. I wished that someone had posted such a list.

Shop	Address	Last verified
Josco Asian Supermarkt	Einkauf-spitz Pius-Parsch platz 5,1210 Wien	Sep 2013
Prosi Exotic Supermarket	Wimbergergasse 5,1070 Wien Tel : +43 1 974 44 44	April 2013
Asian Basar	Neubaugrütel 23A, A-1160 Wien Ph. +43-1-9838414	Nov 2012
Maxitech Handelsges mbH MAX ASIA	Kleine Stadtgutgasse 12/1, A-1020 Wien Ph. +43-1-2147887	Nov 2012
Dhaliwal Cash & Carry & DVD-POINT	Lerchenfelder Gürtel 33, 1160 Wien Ph: +43 9249662	May 2012
Deshi Anton Extosishe Lebensmittel	Schönbrunner Str. 223A, 1120 Wien Ph: +43 1 8100593	May 2012
Purewal KG Indische Lebensmittel	Stumpergasse 62, 1060 Wien Ph: +43 1 5975150 ‎	June 2011
Pride of India	Nussdorfer Str. 90, 1090 Wien Ph: 0676/35 62 615	June 2011
Indian shop	Naschmarkt 974, 1040 Wien Ph: 01 581 15 66	May 2011

I hope search engines will find this list and it will be useful to some people.

Sandeep (of the comment section) has kindly mapped some of the above addresses at google maps.

Amerika ist wunderbar!

Last week I visited the US. This is my third visit to the country. Since people are so friendly there, it is hard to feel foreign in the US but I still cannot stop myself from finding the following things strange about the country.

• They first write the month in a date.
• On US$ coins, they don’t write the values in large numerals.
• Flights at the airports are listed in the alphabetical order of destinations
• At the airports, they still use am/pm for time.
• On a whim, they can drive 100s of kms in some direction and come back.
• After every 30min, waitresses ask if everything is ok.
• Their smallest coffee cup is thrice the size of my expectation of a small coffee.
• They have huge parking lots.
• There are not as many MacDs in the US as I imagined.

Otherwise, the US is fun to visit.