planet4ever said:
Returning home may be another challenge, but I have decided to do it midday Saturday to try to avoid traffic jams. I just have this sneaking, but unconfirmed, suspicion that 10 mph may be worse on mileage than 60 mph, especially in a traffic jam where you are really forced to change speeds a lot.
Sigh. No traffic jams, no better. I think I've found my personal range anxiety point. After this the 90 mile trip to see our granddaughter and great-grandkids will probably be in our Prius. I had a 1-2 punch of stress today.
Stress 1: I set off from Antioch with the battery fully charged (overnight at Antioch Nissan), traveling at 55 on the freeway, occasional slight traffic slowdowns below that but nothing major. And the bars started disappearing like clockwork -- one every
five miles! The m/kWh meter never got above 3.9. I have no idea why; the A/C was at 76, the lights weren't on, the windows were closed, there were no major hills and a net gain of only about 300 feet in elevation. But indeed I dropped to six bars at 30.5 miles into the trip. Sure, there's a buffer below the bottom bar, but half the bars were gone and I'd only gone about a third of the distance. To make things worse, the only place I knew to charge between Walnut Creek and San Jose was Premier Nissan of Fremont, and I hadn't read good things about them on this board.
Fortunately the last six bars seemed to hang on much better, about seven miles per bar. Even the Sunol grade (which I took at 35 behind a truck) didn't seem to hurt me much. But it wasn't enough to make up for the first thirty miles, and I was down to one bar before I took the flyover from 680 to 101 in San Jose, with nearly 25 miles left to go. Bowing to expediency I took the Capitol Expressway exit and headed for Premier Nissan of San Jose. I got the "Low Battery" warning about three miles before I arrived at the dealership. Fortunately again, they had an AV station that was not in use, and were happy to let me use it.
I pulled in next to an identical LEAF that their tech was going over with a new owner. I plugged in, overrode my (midnight start) timer, and made sure the car was actually charging. Then my wife and I went in to the customer waiting area to ... er ... wait. There really wasn't anything else we could do, other than look at cars, and we weren't interested in doing that. I knew my wife was an unhappy camper at this point, so I tried to figure how long we would need to charge. I had asked the nav unit how far we were from home, and it said 19 miles. Based on "sage" advise I have been dispensing on this board, I thought I should be able to get at least 12 miles after the Low Battery warning, which meant I still had at least nine miles of juice rather than the four that the guessometer was flashing. Therefore I would need to pick up enough charge to go ten additional miles, and 45 minutes should about do it.
45 minutes later my co-pilot was chomping at the bit, so I unplugged and we took off. I was a bit surprised that there was still only one bar, but decided that was due to the "hysteresis" that has been discussed. What I didn't do was think that through very well, or check that the car was still charging before I unplugged.
Stress 2: Not two miles from the dealer, we heard the "Low Battery" warning again. WHAT?? I only picked up five miles of electricity in three quarters of an hour? And I now had 17 miles to go? I explained to my wife that a fellow LEAF owner I knew through the internet had offered to let us charge at his place, but she put her foot down. We were
not going to a stranger's house and sit there for
another hour. So I gulped, and slowed down. I took "old 101" (Monterey Road) from San Jose to Morgan Hill, and held my speed to 45. The last seven miles were running on "Very Low Battery", but we didn't go into turtle mode.
Yes, I think I'll take the Prius next time.
Ray
