Sunday, September 19, 2010

Antwerpen Autovrij 2010

It's been a long time since we've taken the kart out to an event, but today we attended Antwerp's car free day. We took the kart out cruising through Antwerp, visiting all of the well-known places, taking our electric kart where no electric kart has gone before.

Staf and Louis came along with Tim and myself, they did the final technical checks and prepared the vehicle for launch:



We brought a little wooden wagon to carry around Staf and Louis, but this wagon can be connected to the kart, so we can take multiple kids along for the ride. More people == more fun! In this movie, Louis is steering, but not paying much attention to the road:



Tim brought his GPS logger along for the ride and has constructed some maps of where we've been around Antwerp. We've covered over 14km on a single charge. Note that most of the time, we were pulling a little wagon with people/kids around as well so the actual range would be a whole lot more ... Our top speed (between pedestrians) was 26kph. The logger produces KML files (to be used with, e.g., Google Earth) and the following maps of some of the fun we had:







In this third part, we tested the pulling power of the kart. In the following movie (in the Nationalestraat), Tim is in the driving seat and Staf is steering, while Louis and myself are in the wagon behind the kart. We drove over 3 kilometers like this. Yes, the kart can easily pull four people (two big, two little) around the streets of Antwerp :)



After a fucking copper no longer wanted our illegal vehicle on the public road, we abused a basketball terrain for some nutty driving with the kids until the batteries got close to being drained.



Here's Tim and Marieke taking the kart out for a little drive around the basketball court.



It was another fun day with the kart! We should do this more often ...