DaveinOlyWA said:
the increase in efficiency from less rolling resistance from increasing tire pressure is not dependent upon the method of motivation.
My initial intuition agrees, but thinking about it more carefully I'm not so sure that applies to
total energy consumption.
For starters, the LEAF already had low resistance tires. These should be stiffer than normal tires, so increasing the pressure would probably have less an effect overall.
Then consider the efficiency of the drivetrain. Assuming gasoline ICE is 20% tank to wheels and the LEAF is 80% battery to wheels to make the math easy...
For a particular style of driving we need 20,000 [favorite units] of energy put to the road.
ICE, 20% efficient, uses 100,000 units of energy input to get 20,000 units out. If over-inflating the tires decreases this by 5% we only need 19,000 units on the road to do the same driving, so we need 95,000 input. We save 5,000 units.
EV uses 25,000 units of energy to get the same 20,000 units to the road. Again we over-inflate and only need 19,000 units. Calculating back we now have 23,750 units input for a saving of 1,250 units total.
In other words, we saved 5% in both cases as we would expect, but for the EV we saved 5% of a much smaller margin. This is somewhat like replacing a car that gets 10MPG with one that gets 15MPG, versus replacing a car that gets 30MPG with one that gets 40MPG.
=Smidge=