A week ago we took possession (with a three year lease) of the Starship, aka a Silver LEAF with the DC Fast Charge Port. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the Northern edge of "Silicon Valley".
I figured the DC port would help make the car useful for mid-range weekend travel, say 100-150 miles one way (with a DC "add 80 miles of range in 25 minutes" charge along the way) for overnights in Monterey, Yosemite, etc.
But now I'm thinking that unless the EV Project really gets going, the L3 Station Network may not materialize until the last part of our lease.
So to test the next two year's "weekend road trip" waters, this past weekend my wife & I did an overnight trip to a friend's house which is about 4 miles outside Sonoma (near the top of a 1,200 ft. hill, BTW!), 75 road miles one way from our home.
Including a disastrous 6 mile side trip to a ChargePoint L2 EVSE :evil: (which was "out of service" even though the ChargePoint iPhone app and webpage showed it to be available) on Saturday and a successful Sunday morning coffee run into Sonoma, we drove a total of 165 miles in two days, arriving at each day's destination with an average of a little less than 3 bars (of 12) remaining on the battery display.
Note that we did get a "stage 1" Low Battery warning from the LEAF just past the base of the final 2 mile, 1,000 ft. hill.
And we got the Stage 2 warning (where the "remaining miles" display turns to dashes) pulling into our friend's garage. :roll:
Thankfully
Turtle Mode was avoided although I figured it was in play after the ChargePoint station debacle; my intuition that we would benefit from an L2 "splash & dash over a latte" at the San Rafael ChargePoint station turned out to be realistic.
(I reasoned that if
TM occurred near or anywhere on "The Hill", I would turn around and putter 2 miles into Sonoma and beg for a 240V socket somewhere.)
Note that I drove 56 mph on the highway and the speed limit in towns given that:
a) two hours of seat time is fine with me, and ...
b) most of our driving was going to be in hilly terrain (e.g., Interstate 280, San Francisco's 19th avenue, the Golden Gate Bridge and Waldo Grade, Rt 101 to Novato, and the hill that our friend's house is built on) such that the over-the-road distance of 75 miles would really be closer to 85-95 equivalent miles.
I had already put 300 miles on the LEAF doing errands around the Bay and had been averaging well over 4 miles per kWh including lots of freeway miles.
IMHO, this trip would not have been practical (given that there are no L2's in Sonoma and our friend does not have an L2 charger) without Phil's 240v Upgrade to Nissan's L1 EVSE.
The 240V upgrade opens up leisurely travel for mid-range distances because L2 charging (adding 12-13 miles to your range per hour of charging) is really only useful overnight (rather than during the day of a 75-80 mile trip, unless you find an L2 at a really interesting place), and 120v overnight charging at a residential destination cannot completely refill the battery for the next day's travel if you are arriving at your overnight destination with a nearly empty battery (stock Nissan L1 charging adding only 5-6 miles of range per hour of charging).
In our case we added 20 kWh (80+ highway miles (at 56 mph)) to our battery in 8.5 hours of overnight charging using the modded Nissan L1 charger in our friend's garage (using a 240V circuit with a NEMA 6-20 receptacle).
And had enough confidence in the reasonably fast charging rate of the modded EVSE to do an 8 mile RT coffee run with our friends the next morning (including a battery sapping return up their hill) before topping off with a 1.5 hour charge and heading home.
Thanks, Phil, for this terrific addition to our LEAF's bag of tricks.
