Solkjøring is a 2022 Nissan LEAF SV Plus. Claire named her Tesla 3 Greta, for obvious reasons, and to honor Maphiyata echiyatan hin winⁱ. I searched for an appropriate name for the LEAF. I was tempted to name it “Svante” after Svante Arrhenius, but I thought “Too many first names.”

We have an electric home, powered mostly by solar PV panels^ii. The exceptions are (a) a gasoline-powered water pump in case the neighboring wetlands and latent streams flood, never used, but just in case, (b) a propane-powered emergency backup generator, again seldom used, and (c) a propane grille. The rest of it, from stoves, to laundry to heat pumps heating and cooling, our hot water heat pump hot water heater, even our lawnmower, are all electric. There is an orphaned oil furnaceⁱⁱⁱ which exists in case temperatures drop below C^iv.

I’ve written before about our arrangement.

Solkjøring means “sun riding” or “sun driving” in Norwegian. Since the LEAF is charged primarily using electricity from our solar panels, I thought that idea a compact description in a single word. I mean there’s the German sonne fahren but that’s not as compact.

So Solkjøring it is!

The only downside of the name I found is that the Nissan USA portal and app use a database which store words in ASCII. They don’t even use ISO 8859-x, let alone Unicode UTF^v. Accordingly when I entered the name as properly spelled it was rejected^vi. So I chose to approximate it Solkjoering in those places, but Solkjøring is what the name is, properly spelled.

ⁱ “Woman who came from the heavens.”

ⁱⁱ We’re planning to power the remaining by getting more panels later this year or early 2022. More on that later.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ironically as climate warms, that’s becoming less likely, even around Boston.

^iv One for which we’ll probably never need to buy oil again.

^v WordPress accepts them.

^vi I’m used to such corruptions as my given name is “Jan.”