More early impressions of the Whill Model-CI. I took the J MUNI train to Dolores Park yesterday and it was pretty easy to do everything. I’m getting used to joystick driving, feeling more confident there.
The new MUNI cars are spiffy – clean and sparkly even. The large front wheels of the Model CI were great going over the gap between platform and train. In my Travelscoot I had to gun it at top speed to jump the gap. I especially like the new accessible button placement for the front of the train car. You can reach it whether you have the seats flipped up or not (while the old style cars have the button under the seats — you can’t get to it if you’re actually sitting on the seat, and have to yell to the driver instead.) The bigger windows on the car were great.
(My ride home was also fine, old style train car, more crowded, but not hella crowded, and people moved aside for me. I did not run into anyone. Or, if I did, I then ate their souls and brain-wiped every witness so it’s more or less like it never happened.)
No problems navigating around the cafe. I practiced a few times at pulling the chair up to the table with the arms half-raised. If you have an iphone I think you can raise the arms, then steer the chair with your phone, but the remote steering doesn’t work from android phones yet. It worked ok to raise the arms a little, pull forward, then turn off the chair and pull the arms further back.
Then I zoomed around Dolores Park for a while. By this time I was in “sport” mode.
Eco mode – the highest speed is limited. Ignore it
Normal mode – high speed (setting 4) is 5mph. setting 3 is maybe 3mph
Sport mode – high speed is still 5mph. Setting 3 is 4 mph or so.
I didn’t notice any other differences between these settings.
OK so here’s the buzzkill moment – I was zooming down a long glorious hill on the highest speed and then – the chair downshifted on me! Slowed to a bumpy crawl! When I say to go 5 miles an hour, I mean it! Don’t decide without me! (I missed my train, as well as the fun of going fast downhill). Instead of zooming with the wind in my hair and feeling free, like a cyborg should, I was imagining some grim Authority Figures telling me that it wasn’t safe and I wasn’t allowed and then I imagined myself flipping them off!
You know what I’m going to say!!!!!!!
The motor controller should be hackable!
Or, at the very least, fine grained enough controls on the phone so we can program it to do what we want it to do.
Turbo mode!!!!! 6mph! And no sad, draggy-ass downhill downshift!
I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last!
The battery was at 75% when I got home, seems fair enough but it depleted faster than I thought it would (it was not all THAT much zooming around the park.)
Picked up groceries today in pouring rain on an even steeper hill with leaves everywhere on the sidewalk. Also fine. I hung two bags off the back of the chair and had another heavier back on the footplate between my feet. It’s now feeling routine to switch to speed 2 when I go into a doorway. And I feel more at home on day 3 of driving around – it has started to feel like second nature.
.