/"Don't forget about having heat and defrost on. At an average city speed of 12mph, those accessories eat up quite a bit of power."/
That's the main effect. Those are constant power loads so the energy per mile consumed increases with decreasing speed. A graph of total energy per mile the vehicle uses, traction plus these constant power loads is a somewhat U-shaped curve, increasing greatly at low speeds due to the constant power loads, and increasing again a very high speeds due to increasing traction power. On my car there is a fairly broad "sweet spot" centered around 40-45 mph. Plus all the re-acceleration on hills. I can easily believe energy consumption is that high. More on topic...When you scope out charging options Cal keep in mind that you need redundancy. You have to be able to get to work each day, so you can't afford to place all your bets on one or two EVSE or outlets that may not be available, may not be working, or may go away. I think I would use the light rail if it doesn't require fairly long walks in Cleveland winters. I'd also consider a Volt since your gas consumption and carbon emissions would be small for such a commute, especially if you get to charge at work much of the time. My car is a conversion, but it has about 80 mile range like the Leaf, and I've been driving it for over 7 years as my main car. I've never been stuck, but that's because I always have a back up plan for charging when I drive far enough away that I must charge to get home. -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/Leaf-recommendations-tp4684676p4685918.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
