Quote:
Originally Posted by cjd
30 minutes would get only 9 miles here. Heck, it was 40 minutes for 4 miles yesterday for me, including some spirited driving in a couple spots, if you want to call it that - as much as I'm willing to do in the city around pedestrians, bikes, and lots of other cars. City life does that, with lots of waiting at lights for a few moments of moving. But I can still turn and accelerate hard when I get the chance.
I've also observed the battery range on my wife's car go UP over the course of the mile-ish it usually gets driven. That's a Volt, which is perfect for those super short trips that are most common, without leaving us stranded for longer trips.
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Are you saying it takes 40 minutes to actually go 4 miles, or that the battery range in the Volt says 4 miles less after 40 minutes? If the former, that's why I live not in a city lol.
These range readouts are inherantly inaccurate. There are so many variables that must be
predicted in order to determine range (same as gas engines) that it's impossible to say how much range you have at any given moment. These include environment (temperature, humidity, solar load), weight, voltage, age of battery, age of motor, efficiency of driver, speed, accessories (AC, sound system, connectivity), brake bias (e recovery vs mechanical) etc. Since it can't see the future, the car probably stores some history to adjust based on current conditions. This is why you can see strange things like range going up after driving, or range going down significantly overnight (also batteries need to be temperature controlled as I understand it).
The other side of the problem is you can't just show voltage or even KWh because that doesn't actually tell the user anything.
Anyway, the point I've been working towards is that citing the readout for "I went x miles (or x minutes) and only lost y range" is not a good way to determine overall range of any vehicle. It does not scale to the full range easily and you have to account for many more variables to do so.