Aeromod nissan leaf improved aerodynamics increased range

[Brenthasty]

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.

[mux]

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.

[KraigSchultz]

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.



Watch fuel logs at this site to up to date results of testing: https://ecomodder.com/forum/emgarage.ph ... leid=10278

[1932highboy]

Nice work. That looks clean and aerodynamic.

[KraigSchultz]

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.

[KraigSchultz]

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]

can't you paint the pizza hubcaps black?

[LeftieBiker]

I suspect that the turbulence in the wheel wells just "drowns out" the added benefit of the hubcaps. Rear wheel skirts might do more.

[KraigSchultz]

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.

[LeftieBiker]

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.