Can you drive 100+ miles in EV (no charging)?

My best in my 2011 Volt is 82 miles pure continuous EV miles from Keystone/Dillion on Summit County Colorado up the loveland pass then down I70 (highway at 65mph) and them some side roads after I was pretty much down. If I did it on a high traffic day, so slower speed, I could probably hit 100. If playing games with MM I could collect unbounded numbers.. record "EV miles" this trip in a volt is over 1000..

For continuous EV range, best place might be Haliakalia or Mona Koa with someplace to charge at the top. and more 12000 ft vertical drop and slow speed limits ;-) then just drive around the island..

 

Volt :O

iPad ? HD

 

I accumulated 34 EV miles with a single charge over the 1000 miles I drove last holiday weekend. You can see in my Fuelly notes that EV miles increased but electricity remained constant because I didn't plug in. I used HV for uphill and regenerated in EV downhill. I used up the EV on local roads.

If it was a 3000 mile journey, I suppose I would have traveled 100 EV miles on a single charge. The PiP considers them EV miles even if it didn't come from an outlet.

 

So . . . I guess the fact that you have to first CLIMB that 10,000' rise (and the accompanying crappy mpg's) must necessarily get tossed out the window.

Even a full blown funny car can do it now under those "what-if's"

But NOW you have to factor in all the energy to build this ramp ... mine the steel ... haul it up to the top of the 10,000 foot rise. I think you're running up your losses to the incredible, the more you 'what if'.

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I don't believe you could get the miles out of Haleakala, and there's really only one uphill section on the way down which one could probably coast through in neutral in an ICE. But I could be wrong and would love the chance to go and try.
I've gone up and down as a bike ride & dreamed about the descent for weeks afterward.

I unfortunately didn't commit the details to memory or paper, but I'm pretty sure last summer I went about 50 miles EV on the way out of Whistler, BC.

 

Certainly, it doesn't make much sense to waste gas driving up a mountain for no reason other than to see what sort of downhill feats one can pull off. But the idea being talked about here are mountains that we would drive anyway, say for vacation.

So one has to compare the feat of the PiP to an ICE or regular Prius. That said, the PiP does much better mpg's on the way up than almost any ICE. And since we are going uphill to vacation anyway, all the more awesome to utilize way more of the potential energy on the way down than an ICE or even a regular Prius.

 

oh I get it ... what would be interesting and fun to figure out would be weather the volt or [edit] PiP is more efficient going 50 miles from 0 sea level to 10,000 and then back downhill to sea level when you factor in each cars capability of regen

 

I doubt a leaf could go 50miles from seal level to 10K.. That much upkill is a lot of energy demand. For the 1500kg leaf that represents about 13.5kWh of potential energy (ignoring driving friction, air resistance etc). If one charges to 100% there is about 20kWh usable, so that would require driving 50miles on about 6.5kWh.. or about 7 miles per kW.. which seems unlikely.

According to my favorite EV planning site

A drive from Makena Park HI (sea level), to the Haleakalā observatory (10,100ft), at distance of 80km (50miles) at a nice slow pace of 35mph, A Leaf would arrive with with about -30% battery.. i.e. it cannot do it.

The Volt would make it up with no problem, but would need to gas.. The EV planner says a Volt would arrive with -98%, i.e. almost 2 full charges to do it in EV mode.

(And FYI, a Model S 85Kw model would arrive at Halekala with 60% charge. )

But in general the leaf would be more efficient as is generally more efficient in EV mode than a volt. But the again at least with a Volt I'm sure I could make all the way up.

 

Yes ... at speed, one can count on dropping one bar (on the Leaf's guess-o-meter) for every 1,000 of elevation. You get roughly 1/2 back via regen on the down hill. You'd have to creep up the mountain at well under 24mph in order to do 7mi/kWh. Too slow, then you have parasitic loss to contend with. I actually meant the PiP in the prior post (edited alread) ... wondering which between the Volt & PiP (would be more efficient) on the theoretical 50mi / 10,000 climb.
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Ah.. at for Pip vs Volt on a such a climb I would expect the Volt to do better. I'll not be shipping my volt to Hawaii, but I have taken it up Pikes Peak. This i was a longer overall trip (106 miles) as I started in Monument CO, with elevation down 1000 then up 6000-14000 or 8000ft maximum elevation change. I've documented my trip with a map showing battery SOC and engine RPM levels and other OBD2 parameters. The Volt averaged 66mpg overall (including battery) over those 100 miles. The Trip down generated 39miles of estimated EV range (which I used getting home which is back up a different hill). But as the base of the peak is 20 miles from my home, a PiP would be out of battery power long before I got to the mountain unless I saved it. Similarly in the volt (I have no hold mode) I also used lots of power on normal driving before/after the climb.

SO if there is anyone with a PiP (or even a prius) that wants to drive up Pikes Peak we could a direct comparison. There a few threads here on a PP climb, e.g. Pikes peak climb | PriusChat
but none reporting MPG. The did note the engine runs almost the whole way down.. (as it will when battery is full). I did some net searching but did not find any data showing MPG in a Prius or Pip.

 

We just did Pikes Peak today in our new Ford Fusion Energy (see "Have PiP, Bought Ford Fusion" thread elsewhere). We ICEd+EV-Assisted our way up to the top of Pikes Peak from Colorado Springs. Funny thing about how Ford implemented its EV charging: on the way down, we stealth-charged the traction battery from empty to completely full. The road down is about 18+ miles. Our traction battery, normally reliably good for 22 - 25 miles of pure EV, indicated that it was full at "43 EV miles" and stopped taking any more charge about three miles before the downslope end of the road. The car kept generating EV juice by its standard EV indicators, but the traction battery capped its displayed capacity at 43(!!) miles and would not "take" any more. BTW - a similar stealth charge happened last week during a very long descent in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming, but it peaked then at an indicated 37 EV "miles" and did not cap the battery capacity display.

Point of Interest #1: I fully expected the Ford Fusion's ICE to turn on as the charging system reached this full indicated capacity of "43 EV miles". Once this happened though, the ICE never turned on the rest for the three+ miles left of descent, nor during the additional descent on US 24 into Colorado Springs. I therefore assume the Ford system somehow shorts the excess electric energy without using the ICE, unlike the Prius - perhaps akin to the old Zener diode of 1960s British Triumph motorcycles, which was designed to shed the excess electricity as heat.

Point of Interest #2: Despite the indicated alchemy of extra EV stealth charge miles (indicated 43 miles vice factory-claimed 24 miles), our immediate road test from Colorado Springs to Denver reduced our expectations to reality: the car produced actual 23 Ev miles at freeway speeds. IMHO, the Ford software algorithms cannot logically digest stealth-charging and appear to falsely double the displayed EV capacity after such a downhill run.