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Alpine Road Trip

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Alfred

Member
Supporting Member
May 28, 2009
300
259
Zurich
I was surprised how much energy was recuperated on this 3-pass trip.

Where the power comes from!

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Interesting ! Thanks for sharing that !

( Your headlights are fogged :tongue: )

So ... you used an ENTIRE 53kWh battery capacity (NET), and still had 166km left! :biggrin:

This was your 317km approx. routing, correct ? Route


Edit: BUT: I forgot to ask: how much energy did you add ? Reading more carefully thru your blog, you did some charging Handeck?
 
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Is that 5:44 h the pure driving time or does this include breaks (for taking pictures, Käsefondue for lunch)? If so, could you detertermine the pure driving time by subtracting the breaks? I'd like to see how the average driving speed correspondents to the 157 wh/km in mountain driving. Thanks!
 
Recharged at Handeck

To feel more comfortable and to be free in driving style on those fabulous roads I recharged at Handeck, about half-way up to the Grimsel-Pass. This is a hotel near the pictured excursion to Lake Gelmer. In a short walk across the hanging bridge you can reach the cable car, built in the 30's for the workers at the dam.
At the hotel I plugged in first for an hour or so with 240V/16A (blueCEE "camping plug"), until the hotel manager found the much better 32A (red CEE) plug underground in an access tunnel. So after lunch I dropped the car there for 2.5 hours. I charged overall from 139 ideal km left upon arrival to in the end 314 ideal km upon leaving, about the equivalent of having plugged in 3.5 hours at 32A. That was on the cautious side as I was unsure how much of that energy would come back on the way down on the other side of the pass and later down from Andermatt again.
The trip duration does not include the times the car was stopped without being turned on, e.g. when charging. Interesting was that even a bit of sporty driving on the passes did on average not consume more energy than the motorways, rather a bit less. Speed and air resistance matter of course. On the mountain passes speeds will range mostly from 20-60 km/h (a few hairpins there).
 
Route

To ChargeIt: I took the longer way along the Western shores of lake Lucerne on the way home, so the overall trip length was the 337km. The energy consumption from Zurich to Wassen, mostly Motorway, but going uphill for some time was 173 Wh/km. At the top of the Sustenpass that cumulative average had risen to 213 Wh/km and fell again then to Handeck to 186 Wh/km. Considering that Handegg is at 1400 msl, so nearly 1000m higher up than Zurich, that is doing quite well. As I was certain then to be able to make it home comfortably, I had stopped recording more individual averages after Handeck.

Altitudes passed (meters above sea level msl):
Zurich: 430 (start and end)
Wassen: 916
Sustenpass: 2224
Innertkirchen: 625
Grimsel: 2164
Gletsch: 1757
Furkapass: 2429
Andermatt: 1436

I also learnt that on this type of trip, estimated ranges become (logically enough) hard to interpret. On the way back, after Wassen, the estimated range showed for a while over 500km range.