Its been 6 years now and i am still happy with my Vectrix......

HI RADY, thats good that you have such good success with your vectrix,there are most like a lot of people out that have had good and bad success that have never seen this forum. anyway just start looking and reading there is a lot of info. and photos here with in the last 7-8 months.

I've had mine 4 years and 15k miles, and am similarly still very happy with mine. However, I have found my range dropped a little bit each year so was looking to do a li upgrade. In the end I bought a 2ndhand Li+ and am in the process of selling my NiMh as this seemed the most cost effective way to do an upgrade.

Hi rady, it is a great pleassure to read you here again! As bluestreak points out, there is plenty info here. My favourite upgrade, the leaf conversion. Caruso, the nimh cells will last more than the lithium gp cells, better keep that nimh vectrix.

The NiMh cells are struggling to get me the 25 miles to work and back when it's cold and windy. The Li+ can do the trip twice with ease.

Forgot to post that i was looking again more often into the forums because i was thinking of a battery pack upgrade. I really want to know what options are available.
Thanks

leaf modules are the cheapest and easiest at present - gives you 60Ah and 100km+ range

other than that,
CALB 40Ah, CALB 60Ah both fit in the original battery box

I got my bike the week of the first Vectrix bankruptcy and was then one of the lucky few who got a FREE battery swap, with the help of this group and youtube postings of my battery errors. Guess my 2007 bike had been on the lot discharged too many times to have good batteries. I am now approaching 20K miles, if I can make it to 30 I will have paid for the bike with savings over driving my 70 MPG car!

I moved it to the mountain house over the winter, of course then we had NO RAIN so I could have been riding it to work all this time. I have the seat at the local upholstery shop right now as I split it at the seam last year. It won't match, but it will be water tight again, so I can bring it back home where it has to live outside.

I do love riding it up the mountains, it is really a climber. And the range is perfect for up there, but I want it here too. Likely I will keep an eye out for a $1000 bike that I can maybe upgrade to Li down the road. There was a $500 one in Fresno that I should have jumped on... I do like not having to think about gas and oil. Just plug it in every month as needed when it's in storage. Other than tires and the brake light switch I have had zero maintenance.

-Randy

Hi Antiscab:

What do you mean by "leaf modules".Battery modules from a Nissan Leaf ?

What do you mean by "leaf modules".Battery modules from a Nissan Leaf ?

They sure are, you need between 17 and 20 modules (I normally use 18)

http://www.hybridautocenter.com/HAC4/index.php?option=com_hikashop&ctrl=product&task=show&cid=3&name=nissan-leaf-battery-module-...

My 2007 VX-1 is still running perfectly. I upgraded to the Li-ion batteries in 2011 (thanks to antiscab and The Laird). My pack is now 50AH (7.5 kWh), which gets me about 50 miles/charge (real world riding). I have a rather short commute, so I only have 16K miles on the bike, but I expect it will keep on going... and going... :-)

Same here for me.

It'll be 7 years this September since I took delivery of my new VX-1. Have covered about 16,500 miles (26,500km) so far.

Running costs have been very low and the only real costly issue was a few months ago when I had a thermal incident with the temperature sensors - requiring replacement of both sensors and the charger.

Have since discovered that mine was one of the intial batch that had already had the battery pack swapped at the factory. Build date October 2007, battery pack January 2008.

Although I don't use it much at the moment, I still switch on a few times a month, check the voltage and recharge when required.

Possibly the internal Ah counters in the ESD cause this. Try to drive about 5aH and charge again. Does that make any difference?

We just discovered the problem.
Its related with the Emus Relay. The relay's AC-signal under certain 240Ac conditions sends intermittent pulses to the Emus Central unit, confusing it, making it close and open the relay. A 100 uF 25 Volts capacitor between neg and Ac signal will solve that issue.

I observed something similar on a customers bike - I had loaded the laird's firmware, but forgot to remove one of the dead temp sensors
Even though the firmware expected no temp sensors to be present, if any temp sensors were actually connected, the CP stage of the charging process would only last a couple of minutes