2.2 M/kWh - Can anyone "beat" that?

[planet4ever]

One way to get bad m/kwh is to run the heater while the car is parked (like in the parking lot of grocery store when one person goes to get some stuff and others are in the car).

Good point. We took our son to the airport, and sat there with the heater running (and the door open, yet!) while he checked his baggage and Mom gave him a long tearful goodbye. It could have been as much as 5 minutes altogether, I guess. So that was a factor in the 3.4 m/kWh I got this morning. But I swear it was not in the 2.2 m/kWh for the preceding six days.

To add one more data point, we drove down to Gilroy this afternoon. "Down" means in a southerly direction, but it is also a 150 foot elevation drop. I got 5.0 m/kWh for the 12 mile trip down (mostly freeway, 61 mph, no heater), but that had dropped to 4.2 by the time we got back home (same conditions). This was all between 2 PM and 4 PM on a nice day, so temperature shouldn't have been a factor. It seems odd to me that a 0.24% grade should cause that much difference, but I know from experience that I always get much better mileage going down than coming back. Predominant winds here are from the north, which could also explain it, but there was no detectable wind today.

In any event, 4.2 m/kWh at 61 mph compares well to what I used to get last summer, and is above what Tony's chart says I should be getting, so I don't think there is anything wrong with my car, at least not at freeway speeds. But I have always gotten bad mileage on short trips, and I still haven't heard an explanation that I find convincing. For this particular event:

• It was not regen, because I started that six-day period at 80%.
• It was not an illusion, because the number really was 2.2 m/kWh. Yes, it might have been slightly less than 4 bars because of rounding, but I was using the 4 bars in 10.1 miles just as a confirmation, not the primary data point.
• It was not temperature, unless you want to claim that 55° is too cold for a LEAF.
• It was not the climate control system.

There is, of course, the possibility that we will eventually decide to dub m/kWh as GoM-2.

Ray

 

[SanDust]

As I said in my last post, I charged to 100% last night because I knew I'd be driving quite a bit today. This morning I traveled 56.1 miles. I dropped to one bar at about 51, got LBW at 53.0, and I suspect I was 2 or 3 miles from VLBW when I pulled into my driveway, because the GoM was flashing 5. So it's certainly a good thing I charged to 100%.

Just as a comparison, yesterday I went roughly 56 miles at the same speed you were going and had four bars left (two red two white). Temps ranged from something like 60 to 70. Obviously no need for a heater. It's probably just the heater and the temperature.

What I meant by an anomaly is that the car may need a longer drive in order to accurately measure the discharge rate. The car seems to project numbers from the first bit of driving, which I see when the estimated range drops from 103 miles to 87 miles in a quarter of a mile, and with a small sample projected out you could get an artificially low reading. Just don't fully understand how it works but nothing about the projected range is that accurate so I don't know why the projected miles/kWh would be either. You have to assume they're tied together.

 

[DurkaDurka]

Sure, I even have it logged in Carwings since it was the only trip I made that day ... 1.9 miles/kWh. It was a 3 mile trip to show my dad the car. I stomped it a number of times.