A week of "real"

Yes there really is a back seat and we really have had real people in there. Ya stuff several of the admiring crowd in there and...it still moves, really! There's just some rubbing sounds as we have the springs set fairly 'soft' and it kinda waddles under full load.

The big news is that after we came back from a week of vacation we ended up driving it to work and many trips elsewhere for basically the entire week. A slight increase in the slack in the emergency brake cable system greatly reduced the rear brake heating. There's still a little of that so a bit more tweak may be required. Still 20 trips of over 6mi. each and four over 13mi... ya gotta say overall it's working pretty well. Good enough for the real world.

When the battery temperature is around 40deg.F the top speed is around 42. when it's more like 60deg.F it'll crawl all the way up to 44mph! Of course if there's a hill or even an incline we're talking more like 38-40. Fortunately I drop off the car-pooler during the early section of the trip to work when the max posted speed is only 30, that way I don't have to face the (mild) hills and 45mph posted sections with more than one in the car. Overall it seems to work well enough for the commute, especially (oddly enough) if the traffic is fairly heavy and thus a bit slower.
Nobody has honked or had a hissy-fit...yet.

We still have the pogo-ing front end. Sean thinks it's probably the tire. I gather the quality control in terms of roundness is, um, lacking. I put a video camera on a stick so I could hang it outside the car while moving. The video came out fine, but you can't really see anything conclusive. Guess I'll try swapping out the tire.
The batteries, charger and battery equalizer systems seem to be working OK, though there is no way you would know this from looking at the battery monitoring system. It continually complains that at least three of the batteries are in constant 'overcharge' condition and that another is 0.5V higher than the rest. The SOC meter (State of Charge - battery level) almost always shows 100%, though sometimes it will drop to 95% when we have gone 12 miles (about half the useful range) and the current sensor will still show 29Amps one minute after you have pulled to a stop. The technical term for this is "Boogered."
Gonna have to put some work into that. Having $400 worth of monitoring equipment that gives you no useful information will eventually serve as an irritant. Since we'll have the battery compartment all apart to go after this problem we should get a few useful pictures. Later.