planet4ever said:
ELROY said:
Secondly, is there a reason why the Miles/KWHR gauge is stuck at maximum for quite a bit of delay when your resume acceleration after coasting?
Yes, there is a reason, though it is somewhat bogus. They are trying to tell you that you aren't using any 'new' energy at all from the battery, just working off what you saved by regen.
ELROY said:
I know it is not advisable to charge the battery to 100% or deplete it all the way. But has it been proven it is better to deep cycle it between 2 bars-10bars, rather than charging it from 6bars-10bars daily as an example?
I don't know that anything has really been proven, though the general belief among lithium ion battery experts appears to be that they do best if they stay closer to 50%. (This may or may not apply specifically to the chemistry that Nissan uses.) One thing to note is that 50% for our battery is about 5 bars, not 6 bars. If you cycle between 1 full bar and 9 full bars you are using roughly the center 50% of the capacity, so my personal philosophy is to stretch that just a bit at both ends and cycle between what Nissan calls 80% (which is less than 10 full bars) and LBW (which is less than one full bar).
I charge completely ("100%") when I need to, and feel no qualms about dropping below LBW to VLBW if I need to, but most of the time I try to stay between "80%" and LBW. I only average about 20 miles/day, but I really don't know ahead of time whether I'll be driving 0 or 40 miles. So in practice I charge at night (to 80% with an end-only timer) if I am down to 5 or fewer bars. I expect that means the time average charge of my battery is well above 50%, though unlikely to be more than 65%.
Finally, as I said before, when I say one bar, I mean one bar. There are no "red bars" on the battery charge gauge. Cycling between two bars and ten bars really means you are protecting more than 30% at the bottom and roughly 15% at the top. I consider that overly cautious.
Ray
This definitely makes sense. Trying to avoid the last two red bars is just too limiting on range.
I did some more testing today and was alarmed at how fast the bars disappeared at first. The last few bars did last longer as I tried to extract maximum mileage till I got the --- --- -- range reading and no bars. I drove my usual 2.5 mile in-town commute back/forth to work a couple times, then 20 miles to the next city, an 800 ft elevation climb, and then all the way back down again. Mix of 40mph, 50mph, 60mph. It seems city driving eats more range than fwy cruising at 50-60mph tonight. Isn't it usually the opposite?
The breakdown:
Charged all night....achieved 11 bars indicated, so almost full.
45.5 miles trip odometer, down to 2 bars showing. (17hr estimated charge time indicated)
53.2 miles trip odometer, down to 1 bar showing. (20hr estimated charge time indicated)
66.1 miles trip odometer, down to --- --- ---, (23hr estimated charge time indicated)
As you can see, I was averaging only 5 miles per bar for the first 9 bars used. Is this normal for daily driving?
Between the 2nd bar and last bar I went 7.7 miles
Between the last bar and empty -- -- -- I went 12.9 miles! Is this pretty much normal? Last bar is extended range comparitively speaking?
When all was said and done, I went 66 miles on 11 bar...approx 6 miles per bar... Is this typical for all around driving with 33% highway (60mph), 33% rural (40-50mph_, and 33% city/stop/go driving?
So with A full 12 bars, I'm sure I would have been a little over 70 miles total. Is this about normal? I wish there was a poll on what people get in range on a full battery charge.
Interestingly enough...the longer 80 mile trip I made a couple days ago was about 50% fwy driving, with and extra 275lbs in passengers. Which reinforces my belief that 50-60mph highway driving is at least fairly economical, and perhaps more consistent.
Trying to get 5mi/kwhr would be very difficult. With the cruise control set at 35mph-45mph, it was usually below 5.
So all in all, if it takes 20hrs to charge (23 indicated), it will be about $10 in electricity to have traveled 66miles. At $4.20 gallon for fuel, this would be about 2.38 gallons of fuel, or about the same costs as a gas car achieving 27.73mpg. Not remarkable at all.
Once I get a metered level II charger at .13 cents /kwhr instead of my current .32 cents kwhr, then is will only be about $3.90 to charge the battery instead of $10. The resulting economy would be equivalent to a 71mpg trip, which I could live with.