Kyiv Archives - Plug Me In

28 September 2016 by Wiebe

Day 195 – 197 | Electric cars & More in Kyiv

Day 195 | Sunday September 25

My hosts needed to rebuild their kitchen so I helped them a bit with that, okay to be honest I moved 1 cupboard and the gasring. As they didn’t need to care about me I could focus on my own work.

At night Serhii made some fresh food on the bbq, potatoes, meat and more. He has a pretty big garden and he told me that he dreams about having solar panels on his roof, and of course owning an electric vehicle. Serhii had diamonds in his eyes when I offered him to test-drive my car.

Day 196 | Monday September 26

Serhii and Sergei (the other electric car guy) went with me to a car workshop. I told them I had some minor issues and they knew a professional workshop who could fix it. The issue was that the power to the Battery Management System (this is a small computer places under the steering wheel) was loose. It disconnected a lot and this gave not the right information about the status of the battery. Also the cigarette lighter was not working anymore, which I use for my navigation and now I needed an powerbank to charge it every time, not so convenient. The electrician looked at it for a few seconds and had it fixed easily.

Serhii than took me to 2 of his friends/ colleagues from the ElectroCars Club, Vladimir and Sergii (the third Sergii/hii I’ve met in the last days, they are not very creative with names here), they offered me lunch and than I headed to a meeting with Smart City Kyiv. This project aims to create opportunities for the evolution of the capital, combining strategic approach, technological advances and widespread public involvement in the creation of a new quality of life. Their office was location on a former Soviet Union complex where the USSR used to demonstrate it’s technologies. A full interview with Smart City will be published later on this website.

Together with Vladimir and Roman (it’s crazy how many people I have been introduced to today) we went a bit outside of the city to meet Viktor. He converts electric cars and had really special ones in his collection. One serial Chinese EV, a converted Ukrainian car which is the cheapest in the country and… the Synchronous. Probable the biggest electric vehicle I have ever seen, or should I call it a spaceship? It has room for 6 passengers and a driver. Monaco ordered this car and it had been driven around in the country, now it was here for maintenance. It has a 24KWh battery and 180km range.

My host for tonight was Vladimir who is the husband of Alina who I met at the Georgian festival earlier this weekend. We parked the car to charge at a nearby fuel station. At home we had some food with Smetana, it’s some kind of sour cream and they put it on everything. Doesn’t matter if it’s sweet, sour or another taste, they like it and I like it too.

Day 197 | Tuesday September 27

Time to leave Kyiv. It would be a long day as I needed to travel 300km. With Vlad I picked up the car at the gas station and together we drove to an Okko station just outside the city. There Sergii (number 3) joined us and we had some belated lunch.

The remaining of the day I drove a lot, charged at a few places and arrived at a hotel late in the night. The ElectroCars Club guys arranged this for me.

Support me

Lately I have been receiving messages from people who want so support me with financial resources. I always declined this as it was the challenge to do it without money, which worked well in the first part of this trip.
Now I am reaching a new stage: the Middle-East and I am going to need a lot of visa’s, temporary car insurances etc. so it’s going to be more convenient if I have financial support.

On the website I added an option to make a donation. You are free to decide which amount you want to donate and you can pay easily with PayPal, iDeal or bank transfer.

See this link: 2024.plugmeinproject.com/donate

It’s open now and looking for €29 to pay towards the visa for Turkey. Hope you can help 🙂

Pictures

Soviet Building

The Synchronous

Inside

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25 September 201626 September 2016 by Wiebe

Day 193 & 194 | Kyiv

Day 193 | Friday September 23

From Rivne I wanted to reach Kyiv in one day, which is a 330km drive. Under ‘normal’ circumstances not possible but with Ukraine’s charging network definitely worth a try. After breakfast with Ben and Alexandr I left.

I decided to use as much chargers as possible. The first one was as 3-phase charger at a hotel in Novohrad- Volons’kyi. I knew that this was not a free one so I checked first with the reception what the possibilities were, no problem to charge here. I did that for 2.5 hours until it was full and continued to Zhytomyr, just outside of the city was an Okko fuel station. Most of these fuel stations have a charger installed which gives your EV coverage over the whole country.
A few kilometers before Kyiv was also an Okko station so I drove there and thought I would make it from there to my host.

What I forget sometimes is that in some countries a city can have street names which occur multiple times. So when my navigation told me I arrived, I was at an industrial place which didn’t seem right. At a gas station with WiFi I found out I was 30km away from my host. This pretty much sucked as I calculated how much I needed to charge to reach this point, and it was already close to midnight. Now I needed to find a charger nearby. First one was just closed (private parking) but the second one was working, although another car was charging. Funny detail it was occupied by an Citroen Saxo electric, an EV from the beginning of the 2000 era, I saw this car only 1 time before in Germany. The driver was a bit surprised by my car and with a translator on his phone I could explain most of his questions. The older generation in Ukraine doesn’t speak much English.

Around 1am I arrived at Serhii. A few weeks ago another Sergei contacted me on Facebook, he told me he just organized an EV event in Kyiv and was interested to meet me. Today he couldn’t receive me but found his friend ready to host me.

Day 194 | Saturday September 24

Time to meet my new hosts, it was really late last night and after some food we went straight to bed. Serhii is big EV-enthusiast and lives here just outside Kyiv with his wife Lusiena and his kid Ivan. We drove to Mezhyhirya, the mansion which belonged to Viktor Yanukovich, former president of the Ukraine. Now it’s quite to important to know about the revolution which happened in 2014, it’s a very dirty one. In this post I will focus on what I saw today so please read this wikipedia page about it, for some more context. There we met with Sergei, Alina and her kids. All members of the Electro Car Club.

Serhii called Mezhyhirya “Museum of Corruption”. For many years it had been the symbol of the corruption and bad policy in the country, especially under Yanukovich’ lead. When he was the president his mansion was closed for anyone so no-one exactly knew how big this place was and what happened here. Well it’s enormous, about 400 hectares and all artificial. What I saw were many ponds with fountains, a huge mansion, boxing ring, lots of statues and a golfcourse. And we only saw like 3% of it. Also check out this article with pictures of the place when Yanukovich just was kicked out, you will understand what a badguy he was.

I was wondering why electric cars are so populair in Ukraine. Sergei explained me that Ukrainians would like to be completely in depended from Russia, of course they need to import gas from them so when everyone would drive electric that would not be necessary anymore.

Serhii took us than to an event somewhere in Kyiv. It was about the Ukrainian language and the organizers were very pleased to meet me and offered me some gifts (t-shirts). The presentation was fully in Ukrainian but you could notice that it was of importance. The Ukrainian language has been suppressed for many years and people want to promote te language, they are very proud of their language like all Ukrainians are proud of their country.

Than it was time for some relaxing. In Kyiv center we visited a Georgian festival. That includes Georgian foods, music and drinks. Very cosy and interesting experience. Kyiv so far is very interesting.

Pictures