Proposal For an Improved Energy Usage Display in CarWings

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verobel

Member
Joined
Jan 3, 2014
Messages
13
Location
Wellington, Ontario, Canada
Hi Nissan and Fellow Owners;

http://verobel.net/Leaf2013.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The file above is a sketch of what I think would be a good Display for Nissan Leaf drivers. It show a typical return trip profile (me commuting to work) of about 62 km. You can see that it takes about 30 minutes to drive to work and my velocity start at around 40kph in town and then quickly builds up to 85kph on the highway. Finally, when reaching the work area I slow down and park until I do the return trip later in the day.

So the X axis is time and the first Y axis is velocity in kph.

A second Y axis is distance which continues to accumulate throughout the day.

A third Y axis is Battery energy that starts with a full charge (or perhaps 80%) and drops to zero if you don`t have enough battery charge to do the trip under the specified conditions. Notice 2 sliders at the bottom of the page. The first is a temperature slider to adjust for expected temperature range. Now this typically varies over a trip but to simplify you would use the average temperature expected. As you can see, if you were to move the temperature slider to -20, 10 or 0 you would produce different curves of energy usage (shown in colors pink, green and yellow). If you energy curve dropped to zero before you reached the range required (in this case 62km) you know that you must make adjustments like drive slower or possibly charge the battery more (if it wasn`t at 100%).

A second speed slider is also shown at the bottom right side. Here you could adjust the highway speed portion of the velocity curve to trade off battery energy vs. time and speed.

This will not be an exact reflection of the actual drive, but it will be close and easier to visualize what is going on for most users. CarWings could log actual velocity, distance and energy levels and display them on the chart to help us fine tune the chart. Although a return trip`commute was drawn, a second optoin could be to just display have the chart and this could be programmed to represent a one way trip.

If the chart does not display I will post it on my website with a link later. Don`t be surprised to see other EV manufacturers adopt this display. :)
John
 
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