Day 244 | A lot of cars in Tehran

Day 244 | Sunday November 13

One of the journalists who interviewed me yesterday was part of Asbebokhar, it’s a Youtube channel about cars in general and they wanted to meet me to make a movie about the car. I met them in a deserted part of the city were some buildings were destroyed. They had a big land rover and in this setting they wanted to show the differences between big polluting cars and electric cars. It were all young guys who published these videos on their youtube channel and are very active on social media. After the interview they invited me for lunch at a very fancy restaurant in the rich part of Tehran. I am really getting spoiled in Iran! The guys posted some photos about me on their Instagram account and within an hour I got 250+ new followers! So great. This is their account and also check out The Rick Kids of Tehran on Instagram. It’s a very interesting account about how young and rich people life in the city. It’s another world.

After lunch we drove to the office of BYD. It’s a Chinese electric car maker and they are planning to bring their EV to the Iranian market. They heard about my project and wanted to meet me. They explained that Taxi companies are interested in electric cars. Taxi’s drive about 200km a day and their car (the E6) can drive 400km. In the city are 5 million cars and of course this contributes a lot to the air pollution in the city, which is huge. I could testdrive the E6, it’s a big car and very heavy, 2.400kg but it’s silent and drives good. It also has a very flashy and futuristic display which looks like a Japanese pinball-machine.

Than I had to rush back to the city. The traffic here is very aggressive and dangerous sometimes. Drivers totally don’t care, they just go wherever they want without thinking about the cars around them and not even using their turning signals. Apparently there is just one rule here: fill in the gaps.

Professor Afshar invited me for dinner, I drove to the office of Ali and Mehmet and met the professor and 2 other ones of the university. The restaurant was very fancy. Between waterfalls we have a private cabin were we ate some delicious local food. Pure joy.

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