2019 "60 kWh" Leaf e-Plus

[DougWantsALeaf]

I am very excited to see that 5 miles per kWh is achievable at moderate highway speeds.

Do you keep your tires at the stock 35 psi, or keep them at 40-44 for the extra 5% range.

[OrientExpress]

The tires on this car were set at 38 and I left them at that.

[DougWantsALeaf]

Orient Express

Have you done a 300 mile on a charge run yet? At 5 miles per kWh it’s in the realm of possibility.

Was your run in the article done with much hypermiling? (Rolling in N to stops, carefully per MGMT on uphills, etc..)

[OrientExpress]

Orient Express

Have you done a 300 mile on a charge run yet? At 5 miles per kWh it’s in the realm of possibility.

Was your run in the article done with much hypermiling? (Rolling in N to stops, carefully per MGMT on uphills, etc..)

We only had the Plus for a week, and we got close to 300 miles, but the test that I needed to do that I didn’t have time was to run the car to turtle to see where the real bottom was and to be able to be close to a charger so to not brick the car. If I knew what the real bottom was, that would have helped. During the drive I wrote about I had my wife and her girlfriend in the car, and both of them have acute range anxiety syndrome, so I had to err on the conservative side with them or get nagged!

My hypermile is is close to that without the gliding in neutral. Smooth throttle control, using gravity to my advantage looking ahead as far as possible to anticipate traffic conditions and driving in my socks works best for me.

[lorenfb]

So the 7.5 miles/kWh is a distorted number and meaningless for a comparative analysis.

No not at all, but I would recommend you read the article once again and understand that the story is not an empirical analysis.

You had wind "pushing" the vehicle to achieve the 7.5 that you reported. Why the need to mislead the MNL forum about an unrealistic
Plus efficiency, i.e. by "throwing" 7.5 miles/kWh out there? You casually report/write something that naive and interested Leaf Plus buyers
potentially consider factually significant.

[OrientExpress]

Again no, because the same we used the same route coming and going so one sides tailwind was the other sides headwind.

And going uphill will be less efficient than going downhill. I dare say that even you could achieve exactly the same results.

[WetEV]

Does the LEAF Plus have this:

http://www.mychevybolt.com/forum/viewto ... 505#p33733

If not, please suggest that to your contacts as a worthwhile improvement.

[OrientExpress]

I'm not sure that any vehicle has a low 12v battery warning, but it could be something that would add to the drain on the battery, especially if it was added to the telematics that would message a smartphone app about battery health.

All of today's cars have a constant drain on them from the keep-alive systems, so if the vehicle is not going to be used for a period of time, an outboard battery tender is a good thing to have. I keep them on my cars that don't get used that much.

[WetEV]

I'm not sure that any vehicle has a low 12v battery warning, but it could be something that would add to the drain on the battery, especially if it was added to the telematics that would message a smartphone app about battery health.

Not quite how I would engineer it.


What you don't want is the car at the airport at midnight dead. In the rain. At 1C or 34F. With a stiff wind.


What you do want is a "check EV system" light turned on with a code indicating that the 12V battery is getting weak, and may fail soon. Ideally this would provide a few months of warning.

Note that other access to the 12V health might be provided to smartphone app, head unit or something else, but that's not the important thing. The warning light before the failure is. How you determine this might be to look at the 12V charging voltage and current. Simplistically: When the car is powered on, before turning the 12V charger on, measure the voltage. Then measured the Ah delivered until the battery reaches "full", remembering to subtract estimated load currents. Use this to determine remaining Ah capacity of the battery. If below a threshold, flag a code. Probably some other clues might be used...

While this, or something similar might not catch all failures in advance, it might catch most.

[webb14leafs]

Just want to note that I've driven that route and they are pretty "extreme" examples. I'm more impressed by your uphill efficiency than the downhill. I would have expected it to be < 3miles/kwh. That's a steep haul.

What would be fun would be to see how much regen you get during the drive down from tahoe. You probably couldn't do this since you had just charged. Did you basically stay at 100% for a long time? That is downhill for what feels like forever. I would guess you could get 30 miles of regen or more.