leafydragon said:
planet4ever said:
Come to think of it, it's probably true that at least 80% of my trips are under 5 miles. Maybe that's why I haven't paid any attention to trees - there hasn't been enough to pay attention to.
Yes!
From what I understand from the
pro-tree people, it sounds like the trees are supposed to be a measure of efficient-driving-behavior, after normalizing away circumstances outside of the driver's control. (which circumstances? traffic lights? stop signs? congestion? outside-temperature? cargo load? passengers? AC thermostat setting?)
ya, pretty much. its not perfect but its a measure of efficient driving that is NOT based on your miles/K which is related but can be markedly different.
I very seldom see any complete trees. Is it because my trips are short? Why not make it trip-length independent by resuming tree-display across stop/starts?
i find it does suck that you cant have "trip" settings and the only reset option is to power cycle the car
Is there any write-up from Nissan about what the tree-display is?
yep. but we have gone over that. its a measure of how efficiently you drive. what gives you trees? smooth slow acceleration. maintaining constant level of power and speed. slow gradual stops. iow, driving efficiently
What is the arc of dots surrounding the growing trees?
"near" instantaneous feedback on how well you are doing. its not perfect by any means. in fact, try this. go for a drive, try to "peg" it to say... well, we will call it 15 pips (why i dont call it 10, i dunno) so if moving and you have say 12 pips for X seconds, eventually you will gain a tree segment. supposing we say each tree has 5 segments (once again, 10 would make sense, but just saying ya know) after a bit, park it. leave it on.
your tree meter will be sitting somewhere. say its the 12 pips. now the pips will stay that way...for a while anyway. but the car is on and using power but not moving which means VERY inefficient driving right...so, soon you will have 11 pips and so on as you sit there. if you sit there long enough, all your pips will disappear INCLUDING your gained tree segments. (i am guessing this takes about 45 minutes if you started with 7 pips)
now for some people; they will never see trees because
1) short duration drive
2) they drive inefficiently.
now, this is not really a good measure of driving efficiency because if you play with the trees you will see that as long as you brake slowly you can maintain the 15 pips. now what is better is maintaining near constant speed (which does gain trees but not as quickly i dont think. this is hard to quantify...or at least it is for someone like me and my patience level)
but general observations show that at speeds around 30- 40 mph, you can apply power up to 10 KW and stay pegged. in most cases, going up to 12-15 KW will drop you down into the 10 tree bar range. 20 KW will drop you into the 5-6 tree bar range.
now, if you increase speed to say 50-55 mph you will almost never see 15 tree bars, but 12-13 is doable if you are careful and this is with power up to the aforementioned 15 KW so the meter is somewhat speed dependent which means outside variables like elevation, wind direction, etc. will affect your #'s so the trees is not an absolute measure