Real world range test

wtzouris said:

Once the colder weather sets in you will be shocked at the 35% range decrease. Cabin heating and battery heating is the biggest energy consumer but in general you can't do anything about it . You will get nowhere near 100 miles range per day, more like 65-85 miles.

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I lose just a couple of miles of range even on the coldest days. Probably because I only use the seat heaters unless the windows fog up and when that happens I use the defrost as little as possible. However Oregon rarely gets below 30.

wtzouris said:

Once the colder weather sets in you will be shocked at the 35% range decrease. Cabin heating and battery heating is the biggest energy consumer but in general you can't do anything about it . You will get nowhere near 100 miles range per day, more like 65-85 miles.

Click to expand...

Yep. Below 32F range fall to 65-70 miles. But we are spoiled. We using all seat warmers and cabin heater at max

So far works for me just great! With the home charging station and my daily commute to work @ 52-57 miles fits perfectly. Hope range will jump back to 100 in the spring.

Leo,

To address winter where my urban range goes down to 35 miles with a 12 mile daily commute, I have a 110 plug in at work and a short term indoor garage with a 110 plug as well. I also put on Michelin snow tires. They ride smoother than the OEM run flats. I have an air compressor in the boot for the inevitable nail in tire yearly occurrence .

Update: I also bought a 50 ft 12/3 extension cord to plug in the OEM supplied 110v charger. Trying it today at the higher charging rate (1.2 kwH), so far so good.

I agree with the range hit on cold weather short range driving but it is not as bad on longer trips once the battery is warmed up.

Did a trip today:

Start temp 42 Degrees
End Temp 48 Degrees
Extended Charge before leaving.
86 Miles Round Trip
End Battery State 21%

I was a little worried we would need to stop to charge but that did not turn out to be the case. There are 2-3 chargers on the route home so I had a back up plan just in case.

We stopped for about 2 hours at the destination. (no charging).

Average Speed was 40 MPH and we got an indicated 3.0 Miles/kWh.

It is a pretty good route for efficiency. Lower speeds, some red lights but not too many.

When I started indicated was 1.2 miles/kWh but after 3-4 miles it began to climb.

This is and actual 297 watts/mile or 3.37 miles/ kWh assuming the extended range battery capacity of 31.4 Kwh. Drives me nuts that the MB does not indicate this correctly.

Calculated Range 105 Miles. (3.37 * 31.4 Kwh)

So the MB has pretty good range in moderate cold temps as long as you are not stopping and letting the battery get cold again. The route also helped as it is not high speed or does not have a lot of stop and go.

One other thing I noticed. The GOM was at 57 miles when we started and 45 miles at the mid point. So we drove 43 miles and it indicated we used 12 miles of range. (Part of the reason for the discrepancy is it does not consider the extended charge.) This is how messed up the mileage meter is on the MB.

This is the first time I've had the courage to run down the battery to "reserve level". I went 170.9 km (106.19 miles) when the reserve warning came on. The GOM reported I had 19km (11.8 miles) remaining. This was mostly city driving, with some A/C, stereo on, and a 0-75 MPH drag race against my friend's Jaguar last night (his car won).

Other than the careless slaughter of electrons in the NHRA session, I was reasonably careful to accelerate smoothly; keeping the needle in the "economy" range, and anticipate stops and signal light changes to preserve momentum when possible - essentially some modest hypermiling was involved, but nothing over the top. The temperature has been between 70-80 degrees F.

This gives me a realistic baseline range of 120 miles in the summer. It will be interesting to see how the car does in winter with snow tires, -10 degrees, and heater blasting. If my range goes down to ~80 miles, I'm ok with that.

EDIT 8/3/16: Have been doing some combination freeway (70MPH) / city driving with the B. GOM now down to ~140KM (87 miles), which I think is probably about right. Speed murders electrons.