Aeromod nissan leaf improved aerodynamics increased range

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Good on you
Ruby now lives in Finland braving the -25 c winters.
My wife loves the no idle warmup time at these extreme cold temperatures of our EV.

She starts her coffee, texts the car to heat the cabin, makes her meals, grabs her coffee and its just press the on button and go no engine warm up time needed or hard grinding cold starts...

The performance of an electric car is the same, even on the surface of the moon.

I love the no maintenance in such cold...

Aero mods help immensely with such color dense air.
 
I've done some long-range tests with the wheel covers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p6ZJuJECyI

This wasn't an A-B-A test so I can't give good error bars. However, the difference in consumption with previous runs in similar weather and wind conditions is so large that I have to conclude the wheel covers indeed help at least 5%. This is continuously confirmed with another 200km run yesterday that averaged 120Wh/km with air conditioning and sligthly faster/more city driving.

I'm still continuing with more mods until the car consistently consumes less than 100Wh/km. If wheel covers already improve consumption by 5+%, it should be almost trivial to get there. Don't even need to go full retard and tape over all the seams or build a boattail.
 
I'm trying the pizza pans and reverse mud flaps along with the grill block (once temperature cools down a bit).

19" pizza pans fit my 2015 Leaf very well. I modified some extended lug nuts to have tapped hole in the center to retain the pizza pans.

I didn't want to put any holes in the sheet metal of our "new" car so I made adaptor clamps and some extra details to funnel the air for the rear tire air dams - turned out to be a lot of work.

Doing aero testing over the next few weeks to see if it made any difference. Initial results with just the hubcaps and the mud flaps is it didn't hurt.

pizzapans.jpg


Watch fuel logs at this site to up to date results of testing: https://ecomodder.com/forum/emgarage.php?do=details&vehicleid=10278
 
We've completed a week of test driving and could barely detect any improvement in the fuel economy. My wife prefers the look of her stock rims over the pizza pans, so we're going back to stock rims for a while. Here is data on a test I did this morning before removing the hubcaps. We had perfect conditions for testing this AM. Newly paved road, no wind, 67-68 degrees, no traffic (7-7:45am).

By the way, it's my Wife's car, so even though I prefer the look of the Pizza pans, unless we can see more improvement in range, they most likely won't be on the car. We'll be doing more testing including a different set of pizza pans that stick out more and the grill block when it gets a little cooler.

7-15-18-data.jpg


7-15-18-eco.jpg


7-15-18-dam.jpg


7-15-18-pans.jpg
 
Some notes on my test method for the July 15 2018 Velocity vs. Power Chart:

I have a stretch of road way that is newly paved and very flat near my house. On Sunday mornings there is very little traffic so I was able to do runs both directions on the road for 45 minutes with out problems of traffic interfering with my data collection.

Also, as it turns out we had perfect temperature 67-68 degrees and almost no wind.

I used my GPS to verify speeds and set speed control at a given speed. I would then watch Leafspy motor power until it stabilized and then watch for 3 to 4 more readings to take an observed average of the Leaf Spy motor power reading. I would record that for each speed going east and for each speed going west.

I then quickly removed the hubcaps and repeated the testing with no hubcaps.

The Ecomodder data was taken over a week of driving were we log all our parameters and basically my wife and I hypermile as best we can in the traffic / speeds for our normal commuting tasks. Our conclusion is that we could barely tell any difference in our Miles per kWh (even though we REALLY wanted the hubcaps to work). Of course there are lots of variables in daily driving like how much AC we were using and how much high speed verse low speed, blah, blah, blah...

If it were my car, I'd keep the caps on, but it's her car and it blends in better without the very noticeable hubcaps.

By the way, I found this flat road by studying the area around my house with www.flattestroute.com
 
bitmanEV said:
can't you paint the pizza hubcaps black?

They can be any color, design, or message. They have a lot of surface area for making a very noticeable statement - AND improve range slightly. I like the idea of putting color on them with a vinyl wrap - might try a stock wrap like carbon fiber first.

Stock silver they actually have a nice look - but will need something on them to stop corrosion around where I live with all the salt they put on the roads (at least a coating of Sharkhide, or preferably anodizing or hard coating).

I have a second set of pans going on today with a different depth and edge radius to see how that changes the drag. So, now it will be easy to experiment with the looks.

It's not my car, so I have to experiment with things that look good. If it were my personal car, I'd consider making the hubcaps into rolling billboards to display data about various important issues - pie charts would be ideal, but spider diagrams would also work naturally. With vinyl printing, anything is possible.
 
To add to my earlier suggestion, transparent rear wheel skirts (think 1st gen Insight, but clear) might give the most improvement for the least modification and aesthetic degradation.
 
@BrentHasty I realise the leaf and it now resides in Finland but did you have plans/templates for the transparent kamm back parts? Id like to make one/two for my leafs

@Dala thanks for all the mods you are making, a great contribution.
 
I was also thinking of moving to a steel 15” rim with narrower Michelin energy saver tires. Reduce unsprung weight.

I like the skirt idea. Wonder if it could be done safely with something that didn’t require drilling into the body.
 
Dala said:
For anyone wanting a stealthy grille blocker:
https://dalasevrepair.fi/#block-off-plates

Free, 3d-printable and modular.

Dala,

Do you know what temperature we could reasonably get up to with this kit installed? We regularly hit 38C where I live, but I also never QC. I have a 2011. Would a 24 kWh that only drives up to 60 miles at a time ever run into a problem?

What components might overheat as a result of the reduced airflow?
 
I've absent-mindedly left a grille block on in 80F temps with no problems. The first components to get unhappy would likely be the A/C system and the onboard charger.
 
Same here. With my 2013 Leaf, I would leave my painters tape fashioned grill block up for most of the year. Can't say I ever saw the battery having a warmth issue. It's wonderful in cold temps as you reduce the cold air into the cabin, and retain a bit more residual heat on the battery during hard driving.

Has anyone considered a small block on the bottom of the 2018-2019 grill. Think it would help much?

Do the reverse mud flaps really help much?
 
DougWantsALeaf said:
Same here. With my 2013 Leaf, I would leave my painters tape fashioned grill block up for most of the year. Can't say I ever saw the battery having a warmth issue. It's wonderful in cold temps as you reduce the cold air into the cabin, and retain a bit more residual heat on the battery during hard driving.

Has anyone considered a small block on the bottom of the 2018-2019 grill. Think it would help much?

Do the reverse mud flaps really help much?

Hey Doug. What are reverse mud flaps.
 
An increase of 0.2 miles per kwh only means a boost of around 3 miles per charge.
But if it saves you from going into brick mode on the side of a busy dangerous road or gets you to a charger in turtle mode 1 time, it's totally worth it.

If you don't have mud flaps adding reverse mud flaps won't help much.
Just a mud flap deletion, if you have then will give a very slight range boost.
OEM mud flaps act like little air scoops that add drag. Turning that mud flap backwards, moving it to the forward side of the wheel thus using it to block air turns that aerodynamic liability into an asset.

The most economical thing you can do is take the mud flaps off if you have them and sell them on ebay. A new set of mud flaps is $125 and you have to buy the whole set.
So I bet there are people out there who have lost a mud flap and don't want to buy a whole set of 4 and would buy a used one.
 
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