Cowmeat learns to drive the Volt

[rmay635703]

Eco uses pwm or speeds to only allow half the energy of comfort.

Uses your cell app or key fob you can precondition the cabin off the grid but you still can loose a small amount of battery capacity on l1 but the hit means less energy demanded while under way.

Personally I will precondition manually turning the car on, selecting comfort and setting fan speed to low, this gets the core as warm or cold as possible while using a lot less juice.

[cowmeat]

Have you been preconditioning?

I haven't preconditioned yet, the weather is about perfect in the morning so I haven't needed to. Maybe I'll preheat it during the week of winter (usually February) we have here in central Florida, but maybe not even then since it has heated seats.

[cowmeat]

Got my best gas mileage yet on the way to work this morning. Drove the route really cautiously, trying to slow down only when absolutely necessary, only accelerating on downgrades, using the regen when possible, etc . . .

19.1 miles @ 3.8 kWh = 169.4 mpg

Of course there will be more traffic on my way home to deal with, so I probably won't be able to maintain that mpg for the whole commute.

Update - lost a couple mpg on the way home, but still ended up with my best commute so far of 38.1 miles @ 7.7 kWh = 166.8 mpg

[Ecky]

Careful with sigfigs, cowmeat.

19.1 miles @ 3.8kw is 170mpg, with reasonable certainty it's between 165 and 175mpg.

EDIT: I shouldn't poke fun at you, you could probably tear me up pretty badly over sigfigs in my build thread.

[cowmeat]

I wish the thing just told me what the mpg for the trip was like the Insight did!

I have to do math to figure it out, on my Iphone's calcualtor

[Ecky]

Seems to me that, ultimately, dollars are the best way of measuring consumption. It'd be nice to be able to enter hourly electricity costs and fuel costs per gallon. Where I live, electricity is actually more expensive than gasoline, depending on the fuel economy of the vehicle.

I'd like a trip display that has :
-Total dollar cost
-Electricity kWh (MPGe)
-Gasoline MPG (kWh)

[cowmeat]

Where I live, electricity is actually more expensive than gasoline, depending on the fuel economy of the vehicle.

Is it double the cost? Because I get over twice the gas mileage in the Volt as I did in the Insight, lol. Gotta tell ya, it's been pretty nice driving along in my cushy leather seat at 150 mpg with the AC on, tunes cranked and no emissions coming out the tailpipe!

In the long run for me at least, the Volt is way cheaper to operate. I even changed to the shortest route to work (about ten miles shorter each way) with the Volt since it's pretty Volt-friendly, whereas it would have been a nightmare for the Insight.

This week for instance I worked 6 days:

I drove a total of 244.3 miles and used an electric equivalent of 1.57 gallons of gas.

That same drive in the Insight would have been 360 miles @ 71.2 mpg, using 5.05 gallons of gas.

I'd like a trip display that has :
-Total dollar cost
-Electricity kWh (MPGe)
-Gasoline MPG (kWh)

That would be pretty sweet!

[Ecky]

33.7kwh @ 17 cents per kwh = $5.73 per equivalent amount of energy as is in a $2.32 gallon of gasoline.

Granted, the Volt has a lot more utility and is almost certainly more comfortable.

[rmay635703]

Originally Posted by Ecky

33.7kwh @ 17 cents per kwh = $5.73 per equivalent amount of energy as is in a $2.32 gallon of gasoline.

Granted, the Volt has a lot more utility and is almost certainly more comfortable.

Something lost in your calculation is how easy an ev is to hypermile.
In the summer I get about 65-70 miles per charge and off the wall is about 12kw to charge my 10.5kwhr battery
Considering the gas side is basically impossible to hypermile to almost twice EPA I have a feeling your calculations leave out an ev superpower.

I'm a pretty good hypermiler and have never gone more than 50% over EPA on any of my gas cars day in and out. (Yes I know some are easier than others)

If you include this your calculations change, maybe not enough in your case but for many it would cover up day to day cost variation gas vrs electric

[Ecky]

I was under the impression it was harder to beat the EPA numbers for an EV because they're so efficient to begin with; there's not as much low-hanging fruit.