range questions

[SByer]

Jump bumping the car will cause the pump to go on.

[Offtopic] How true! Can't detail the car without starting to giggle at the 100th time I hear the pump come on!

[bolosky]

The attached Range vs. Speed graph was published somewhere, probably on this chat board. Note that the range at 70 mph is just over 175 miles. That would be without agressive driving or use of the heater. Your 170 with heat was actually a little farther than I'd expect. Your car is doing fine.

Most of the freeway driving was at 60, 70 was maybe 10%. There was also maybe another 10% city driving. I was running the heat (both forced air and seat warmers) maybe a little more than half the time, probably on about half power. The total trip time was 4-ish hours. Half power heat is about 1.5 kW, so maybe 3 kWh for the heat. That's maybe a dozen miles of range, give or take. I probably drove another 5 miles at 80, so that costs some, too. I did one hill climb of maybe 400 feet (and then came back down), so that's a few miles (my measurements show if you go up & down you lose about half of the gravitational potential energy; I need to write up that post sometime). Also, I had 20 ideal miles left and I've lost 2-3% of battery capacity.

So I suppose that it's not too far off of what you'd expect.

[chris22104]

I was able to drive the car the last two days. The first day was only about 60 miles (then recharged in standard mode,) and the second day was over 110 miles (again recharged in standard mode.) I didn't clock it exactly. Nonetheless, the pack is coming around. Both before my two driving days and after, the standard mode charge is up to 180-181 ideal miles, using 110v 15 amp input. Hopefully, it will come up a bit more still.

[W.Petefish]

150 Est. Miles is about the standard charge (at least for me), So I'd say that you are getting pretty close to having your pack balanced. Although as of late I have been getting 180+ Est. (highest was 197 on a standard charge w/o topping off).

[doug]

...The disturbing thing was that I only got 170 miles total range. This wasn't because of limited battery capacity, it was because the car was consuming lots of energy per mile. Some of that was heat and some speed and some possibly the outside temp (~40F). Still, it seemed to be pretty low.

The total energy used was just under 50 kWh, which seems roughly right or even a little high for having 10% of the battery left after a full charge.

I charge the car to a full range mode again, and it came out to the same 238 miles. I drove it and charged up in standard mode, and it came out to 187, which is also what it was getting before.

So, at least for my car, running the battery from full to close to empty back to full did nothing to the ideal miles estimated.

That's interesting. Is it possible to get an energy stored value? That would be an estimate of sorts based on the cells. Then an energy used value, which is something the car should be able to measure/record directly. Would be nice to know how well those numbers match up, not obfuscated by range estimates or driving style.