Elevation and Range of my EV

After 3 days of collecting data, I figured I would show some of the results I have so far.  Here is my current data of mileage versus elevation.


What the heck does that show?

RED:  Elevation of each checkpoint along the route

Blue: miles gained from between the point before to the current point

X-Axis - Actual miles traveled to get to this point

For example: Going from 10 to 15 along the bottom.  That means that I traveled 5 actual miles of distance.  The red line goes up (from 1309 to 2665) meaning that I was going up a hill and the elevation changed a lot.  The blue column is at -5, meaning that I lost 5 miles of travel on the vehicle.  Basically, it took me 10 miles of battery to go 5 miles of actual distance.  

When the blue columns go down, I lost distance that I could travel.  Another way of saying this...The car used more power to go that distance.  When the Blue columns are up, I gained distance... Or the car used less power to travel that the distance.

As you can see, there are more up blue columns that there are down columns.  In total, I gain 17 miles of travel distance, on average.  This means that, on average, my 80-mile commute only costs me 63 miles in my car.  So on a full charge, 93 miles of travel distance by EPA standards, I am left with 30 miles of travel at the end of the day.

Side Notes:
  • I only have 3 days worth of data, so this will be more precise as I keep collecting.
  • I have been driving without the AC or air on (unless you call rolling down a window the air).
  • I have not been doing a great job of recording my miles/kwh.  I may start collecting that for each interval that I drive to get better data and give a better idea of how I drive (though the people who know what that data point means probably already have an electric vehicle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 1 of Commute

Image
Day 1 of the commute would be Monday morning.  I had a Sunday night debacle where the 220V port was not working, so I had to charge with the 110V charger on Sunday night and Monday night What's the issue with the 220V versus the 110V?  The Kia Soul EV takes 5 hours to charge on a 220V charger while it takes 24 hours to charge on the 110V charger.  Go figure, getting more electric current causes you to charge faster.  Not every vehicle has the same time-length requirements, but you get the point (slower current = slower charge AND 110V is slower than 220V). So my 220V debacle is that the 220V plug in my garage was not working.  We had the electrician come over and fix their work on Tuesday morning.  Once that was taken care of, I had full charges a plenty.  But on Monday and Tuesday I had to drive to work with a 70% and 60% charge respectively.  This is not a problem, but I do drive a roundtrip of 80 miles and I needed to make sure I made ...
Read more

Analyzing my commute for an EV switchover

Image
I mentioned that, in order to make the best decision possible, I did plenty of research.  Here is the research that I did on my commute.  The weekends are easy, the commute is what I wanted to make sure the EV could handle.  Most people drive less than 80 miles per day, hence the 24 kw battery in most EVs that gets an estimated range of 84 miles on a test track.  What does that mean?  we do not drive on a test track.  So here is the research I did on my commute. Resources: Elevation of points along my commute - https://www.whatismyelevation.com/ An app to help me determine what EV to purchase - http://mygreencar.com/ Spreadsheets - I am a Google sheet person Map tool - maps.google.com Here is a map of the route that I take, by elevation.  Why?  because they say that elevation affects the energy used by an EV and can change the range of the vehicle. So it is not a perfect elevation chart, but you can see that I sta...
Read more