Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Almost everyone who was lucky enough to have received an ActiveE has opted to personalize it in some way.  Those personalizations have ranged from stripping the car of its circuit board styled vinyl stickers to adding EV related pin striping to the car.  Most have blogged about their personalizations, or at the very least, added a post or a photo to the BMW ActiveE Facebook Group page.  I’m a bit late to the party with showing off all of the things I’ve done to the car (although there have been photographic hints of a few things in this blog), mostly because it took FOREVER for my vanity plate to finally come in from the CT DMV – well, that and its summer so I’m not blogging as much as I might if it were the depths of winter.

After seeing some of the creative things that many others have done with their ActiveEs, I’ve come to the conclusion that my analytical nature stifles my creativity, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.  Not that I don’t like what I’ve done, it just amazes me the level of creativity some of the folks with ActiveE's possess.

In my case, I picked up a couple of ‘Powered’ badges from EVbadges.com, some chrome letters that spell ELECTRIC, a personalized license plate bracket and one vanity plate.  Not exactly creative genius type stuff.  Of all of these things I’ve done, the one I’m most happy about is where I opted to locate the ‘Powered’ badges.  By chance they fit perfectly inside some of the circuit graphics on the doors – I like them so much in that location that I find other ActiveE’s look naked to me because there’s just open space there.

Naked

The other modifications that I’ve made are all on the back of the car – that way anyone following me knows it’s an EV – which is important, because most folks I run across have no idea that BMW has produced an EV, albeit a limited edition field trial EV.  After peeling a few of the circuit board stickers, I added ‘ELECTRIC’ to the upper corner of the trunk lid, a license plate bracket directing people to this blog, and the pièce de résistance, my ‘Solar Power’ vanity plate.  Since CT only allows six characters on a license plate it actually came out SLR·PWR, but you get the point.   

If only it weren’t a lie.

You see, the car isn’t solar powered, at least not yet.  Living in a historic neighborhood threw a bit of a monkey wrench into getting a PV array.  In the end it wasn’t too difficult to get approval, but it did add two months to the process.  And once I got the approval, my roofer’s schedule was filled for most of the summer.  So here we are five and a half months after getting the ActiveE and six months after signing a contract for the solar install, wasting all this fabulous summer sunshine.  On the upside, at least my derriere is staying warm.