My Range Experiences so far...

[DaveinOlyWA]

Cruise wastes energy as it over compensates for inclines of any kind, it is more efficient to drive without it.

Is there some kind of scientific data on this or just your own opinion? The reason I asked is I've been using CC on going up the hill and if done right it works much better then trying to maintain speed/power with your foot.

yes, but you dont need it. try it, see what it does.

now, i will tell you. when you set CC for a set speed. it has a delta usually where it will accelerate or decelerate to maintain speed. so, for instance, you have it set for 60 mph. it will run at usually 60-61 mph. when it senses a loss of speed (which you will feel asap) it will not react until it hits like 59 mph at which time it will immediately (not gradually like you would) apply power to accelerate a mere 2 mph rapidly which means instead a nice smooth increase of power, it will apply much more power than is needed for a quick adjustment to 60-61 mph.

now, our speedomoters are calibrated in whole miles per hour but as you know, your body can sense changes in speed at much smaller increments and you self consciously adjust pedal pressure in response to the momentum changes you feel along with the fact that YOU can see the road ahead so you know to ease off on a hill or power up slightly as you start to ascend a hill.

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

another thing you can do...say you want to drive in the same manner that CC maintains your speed.

next time you are out on the freeway all alone, drive with your eyes closed. ya, sounds funny, but you can do it. when you start wandering out of your lanes, those bumps will tell you. so you correct. now it wont be a smooth correct. you will kinda jerk back and forth in your lanes as you hit the lane bumps. the reason is you can not see the turns in the road so you have to wait until you are warned. that is how CC works. it cant tell if it needs to power up or down until its too late (or hitting the proverbial lanes warning bumps)

 

[scharlj]

Really bad idea to incite someone to drive with their eyes closed just to explain how CC works......an accident waiting to happen.

In any case, I think that what you say is mostly correct, however I find that the control deadband is much larger with people driving. Generally you will only speed up when you are about 5mph below or slow down at about 5mph above. That's a deadband five times as big as CC. I know this from experience. Unless your eyes are glued to the speedometer the whole time, you'll never be able to drive within a mph. So what happens is that you compensate, like CC. But in my opinion you'll need more power to get back to the speed (because you let it slip further), even though it's gradual. With my current BMW 330i I have found over years of experience that I generally save about 2-3 mpg by driving with CC as much as I can, the same will apply with an electric car.

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

U r right in the range of speeds is greater but that is how we drive. I find relatively effortless to main a fairly constant speed but usually don't because I want to gain abit of speed going down the hill and maybe lose a bit going up.

Now have been driving Priuses for years and have wondered what I was really saving by doing that. But my mileage has been good so I continue to do so.

Now on our trip to Disneyland I did quite a bit of CC when to the road was flat and straight using the bump control to maintain flow with traffic

As far as the driving blind; just as it is not recommended. For safety reasons.... CC is not recommended for efficiency reasons.

Hou see, both ideas are just as crazy

 

[csriram45]

Day 7: 80% Charge. DB Showed 88 on ECO. Used L1 Charging

On friday I reached home with about 40 miles left on DB with 100% charge. Wife and I had dinner plans with family so I charged the car for another 1/2 hour and it updated the DB to say 58 miles.
We drove a total of 88 miles for the day and came back with 21 miles left on DB.

yesterday worked from home so did not drive out except for a short drive and back. I recharged the car on L1 since I was only going to top at 80%.

Drove total of 49 miles. DB showed 24 miles left. I will know from my Blink charger how much kwH was used to charge back to 80%. Will update tomorrow.

 

[Herm]

We get a lot of messages posted talking about what the range remaining estimator is displaying.. what I would like all of us to do is concentrate on is the state of charge indicator.. the typical message would read like this:

Monday I charged to 100%, 12 bars showed.. drove at 55mph for 65 miles to work (traffic conditions, elevation changes, AC usage etc), it showed 5 bars remaining.. I then plugged-in the L1 charger for 8 hours and left for home with 9 bars showing.. got home 65 miles later with 4 bars showing plus driving methods and conditions etc.

try to ignore the range estimator folks.. its confusing as heck.

 

[csriram45]

We get a lot of messages posted talking about what the range remaining estimator is displaying.. what I would like all of us to do is concentrate on is the state of charge indicator.. the typical message would read like this:

Monday I charged to 100%, 12 bars showed.. drove at 55mph for 65 miles to work (traffic conditions, elevation changes, AC usage etc), it showed 5 bars remaining.. I then plugged-in the L1 charger for 8 hours and left for home with 9 bars showing.. got home 65 miles later with 4 bars showing plus driving methods and conditions etc.

try to ignore the range estimator folks.. its confusing as heck.

I agree but the SOC indicator I have heard is also equally wrong. What really can be measured is the Actual distance travelled and how many kwH to charge to 80% or 100%. The # of bars left is almost always the same on my way to work and on return.

 

[planet4ever]

I don't think the SOC bars are "wrong". They are quite imprecise, and their meaning was apparently changed by the latest firmware upgrade. But "imprecise" simply means that you can only tell the state of charge within 7% or 8%. Whatever the new algorithm is, I believe it is very consistent. At a given state of charge you will always see the same number of bars.

The same cannot be said about the range guestimate. A given state of charge can result in a wide spread of range numbers, depending on recent driving. The range guestimate is of no use in communicating your battery state to someone else unless it is accompanied by detailed descriptions of past speeds, accelerations, terrains, temperatures, auxiliary draws, and driving modes. Even then it would be of very limited use, because I don't think any of us have figured how all of those factors are weighted or how the weighting is damped over time.

Incidentally, you can greatly improve the precision of the bars if you have been watching the display closely and can report something like, "I drove 2.4 miles after losing the 8th bar." Now instead of knowing you have somewhere between 2 and 3 bars we can assume that you have about 2 2/3 bars.

Ray

 

[Herm]

I don't think the SOC bars are "wrong". They are quite imprecise, and their meaning was apparently changed by the latest firmware upgrade. But "imprecise" simply means that you can only tell the state of charge within 7% or 8%. Whatever the new algorithm is, I believe it is very consistent. At a given state of charge you will always see the same number of bars.

Good comment Ray, I propose we label the remaining range display to "Range Guesstimator", it explains better what it really does. Nissan could have an SOC "fuel gauge" with much better granularity, something like 0 to 100.. they know the state of the remaining charge down to the wh level.. we will have to wait for someone to supply a true SOC indicator display, perhaps it can be done from OBD data.

 

[planet4ever]

I've been thinking that if I were designing the instrument cluster I would make the Guestimator smaller, move it more to the center of the cluster, and probably not show it at all until until its crystal ball drops below 30 miles. Then I would make all SOC bars the same length, break them into four groups of three (full, 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, empty) and ... here's the biggie ... segment each bar into 8 separately displayable sections, each worth 1% of current battery maximum usable charge. The segments would drop off from the left, one at a time, until the entire bar had disappeared. Incidentally, since 8 * 12 = 96, not 100, there would still be 4% usable when the last bar disappeared, but much of that would probably be in turtle mode.

Ray

 

[Herm]

I like that, perhaps break out the Guesstimator™ into 3 different ones (but much smaller so it does not draw too much attention), a fast updating one, one that averages your range for the last couple of days and an ideal one with the best possible range you have achieved, ever.