> On Jun 3, 2015, at 5:51 PM, Ben Goren <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jun 3, 2015, at 5:05 PM, Ed Blackmond via EV <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The guess-o-meter provides neither number. > > Ignoring the guess-o-meter for the moment...how accurate is the remaining > charge meter? Can one use it mentally like one does the gas gauge on an ICE > vehicle? That is, if you know that you typically get 100 miles on a full > "tank" and the meter shows you've got a quarter "tank" left, you better not > plan on going much more than twenty miles before charging and even that's > pushing your luck. Does that sort of thing work?
The remaining charge meter is not linear, but seems to be consistent, at least for my 2011 Leaf. When I charge fully (100% vs 80%), I get 12 bars (all of them) on the gauge. The 12th bar lasts for about 3 miles on residential/commercial streets (25mph - 45mph, traffic signals and stop signs). The 11th bar lasts for another 4.5 (sometimes as much as 5) miles. The 10th bar lasts at most 2.5 miles. I can get about 35 miles on the top 8 bars if I never go over 50mph and never accelerate hard enough to have more than four power dots filled (N.B. one is always filled even when stopped). I can get another 37 miles on the bottom four bars: 10 miles on the last bar, 20 on the last two, 29 on the last three and 37 on the last four. Keeping the speed under 35mph and accelerating more gently, I can get another mile or so per bar. One annoying thing is that the system removes a charge meter bar every time it is power cycled if the charge left is less than some threshold of the bar removed. I have not been able to determine this threshold. It eventually recovers from this. If I’m on a trip where I care, I remember the gauge reading before I power down the car. My leaf has a 16.5KWH usable capacity pack. I don’t believe this has changed that much in the 41K miles and 46 months I’ve had the car. When I use it to what I interpret as completely dead (about 3 miles of residential/commercial streets after the very low battery warning where it shuts off the meter), charging to what it indicates as 100% (12 bars on the meter) takes a little less than 5 hours. Assuming my charger is 3.3KW this is about 16.5KWH. The display on the center console says I am averaging 3.9 miles/KWH while the display on the dash says I’m averaging 3.8 miles/KWH. This seems consistent with the 16.5KWH capacity and the total range. I assume I do a bit better than this when I’m trying to drive efficiently. I rarely need to drive efficiently though. The routes I typically travel are well within the range of the car, so I rarely even look at anything other than the speedometer. I plug it in every night and it charges off peak and I start each day with 80% charge. I have 5 bars on the temperature meter. I don’t think that has ever changed. Maybe that gauge is broken in my car. At any rate it is useless they way it is, so I don’t look at it much either. There is the silly gauge that constructs pine trees or something. This does indicate something, but I haven’t been able to correlate it with anything. The longer I drive without power cycling, the more trees it builds, so maybe it is some sort of low resolution inverse range or charge indication. I ignore the tree gauge too. Ed _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
