[Caevlist] Further Adventures in Leafing

[Alan Batie]

Last night, I went up to Hillsboro with a friend who bought a weil-used 
Leaf for a really good price.  This turned into slightly more of an 
adventure than expected...

The Leaf has a battery capacity at 10 bars.  Leaf Spy says 75%, and the 
range guesser said 66 miles.  I was hoping to make a single stop in 
Salem at about halfway, but was suspicious that with the guesser saying 
66 miles, the 50 miles was unlikely.  Another odd thing was that Leaf 
Spy said the SOC was 88.8% when it was fully charged.

My friend had me drive, since I have experience with doing cross-country 
driving and we knew range was going to be an issue.  We decided to take 
the TV highway back to 217 instead of going out to 26 to improve our 
chances of making it to Salem, but it was pretty quickly obvious that we 
were going to be stopping in Wilsonville.  For one thing, the windows 
were fogging and I had to use the defroster, which I double checked 
later and found it using 4.5kW.  It only uses 18-20kW on the highway at 
60mph, so that's 25% hit.  Knowing that I would be stopping in 
Wilsonville, I opted to use a little more heater than I otherwise would, 
but still limited it and kept to the speed limit despite traffic.

We got into Wilsonville after 28 miles and 4 bars left.  That did not 
bode well for being able to make it from Salem to Corvallis at 40 miles, 
but there was always the Corvallis AV charger at 30 miles, and I 
expected to have to use that.

The other surprise was internal resistance, which apparently the Hx 
value is an indicator of, and it ended up taking 45 minutes to do a 90% 
charge of 8.44kWh (90% says Blink, Leaf Spy said 80%; I'd forgotten they 
older Leafs had that discrepancy).

Since about half of the trip to Wilsonville was on low speed roads, I 
took it easy going to Salem and drove at 60mph and no heat, other than 
an occasional blow of air to clear the fog (we'd run the heater while 
charging, so the fogging wasn't as bad, but still happens).  I was 
paying attention to the guesser versus the gps (which had been set to 
avoid freeways, so it wasn't too helpful getting to Wilsonville the way 
I wanted to go ;-) ), and saw that at 65, the range remaining was 
decreasing a little faster than the distance left, and at 60, the 
opposite was true.  At Woodburn, I know I had plenty to get to Salem and 
started to speed up to 65, and then remembered how long it took to 
charge and decided I'd save time by staying at 60.

At the Salem Kia (free and right by the freeway), we charged up to 90% 
again.  The Greenlots charger there still reported a higher level than 
Leaf Spy, but it was a lot closer.  Judging by the pure freeway travel 
to Salem, I figured we had 40 miles at 60mph and no heater, and it was 
36 miles to the destination.  I actually expected to still have to stop 
and charge and was thinking of dropping to 55 if need be - partially 
worried about the hill south of Salem and with the internal resistance, 
maybe not getting as much out of regen - at the beginning, it hadn't 
wanted to regen much, even after down a couple bars of charge, but the 
battery was cold then.  It did seem to be charging faster in Salem and 
the battery had warmed from 4 bars to 5 bars (Leaf Spy said 70F).

We headed out, and the hill didn't seem to affect things as much as I 
expected (I was expecting a "you won't make it warning" going up the 
hill, but it didn't drop that much).

At the Corvallis exit, it was still on track, and usually uses less 
energy, though I'm usually doing 65->60 there, so continued on, and 
ended up making it to the destination with 1 bar and "3 miles" left.  In 
fact just outside Corvallis, I turned the heater back on ;-)  I've come 
into Corvallis with no bars and the range guesser giving up entirely and 
showing "--", but this was close ;-)

And now another friend joins the EV club!

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