December Consumption

I'm at just under a half tank. Had 9/16th left after thanksgiving travel.
monthly september thru december
daily dec 24 thru dec 27

 

It was a balmy 55 degrees. I rarely use the climate except to see how long it take to use 1% after miscellaneous number of miles driven in EV, so AC/Load numbers are mostly added when the wife is driving.
GOM went down to about 30 last month and is holding steady around 34 ATM.
And I use a space heater in the cabin (manual perconditioning) that typically makes the cabin comfortable for 20 miles or a half hour or so, more with balmy temps.

 

I was surprised by that 8,2 miles/kWh on dec 27. Miles/kWh dropped to 6.9 by the end of the day and miles driven went up to 55.5
When miles/kWh are that high, it doesn't take much brisk acceleration, having to keep up with traffic or rising elevation to bring that number down really quickly.

I was really confused when looking at the pictures from dec 27 and it's taken a few days to piece together that trip.

I finally remembered I'd started the trip late on dec 26 and gone 8.5 miles before midnight dec 27

I'd been so used to driving in temps below freezing, being used to the reduced EV range, when I noticed at 15 and 30 miles the percent of EV range I had left with 55 degrees, I tried to eik out everything the car had. And the car just seemed to keep giving me more range than expected. I finished in my driveway with 1/10 EV left, trying to rock the car up the last hill before turning into the neighborhood with a fairly steep 1/10 mile decent and final 2/10 mile flat to the driveway.

I had to switch to HV on dec 23 because I'd overshot EV range and there were a few other similarities between dec 23 and 27 trips that made it had to remember which one was which from the pictures I had.





for 2 or 3 days I was wondering what kinda tricks the car was playing in me. lol

 

Meanwhile, down here in the southland: M/kWh increased finally in December. MPG was low thanks to a couple long trips. It's the first time i wasn't pegged at over 199.9 since the 6,000 mile trip in May.

 

Low A/C load does help EV efficiency for sure. In my climate, having no heat during winter is not an option. Even if I can tolerate the temperature, front window still need to be kept defrosted. For my daily commute, I can't complete the entire distance of 36 miles in EV mode during winter. I use both HV and EV most of winters.

For the last two winters, I just used HV in the morning and saved EV range for my afternoon trip, but with this set up I was still using quite bit of battery power for heating in the EV MODE, over 20% A/C load ratio. This winter I have been using both HV and EV but switching them during both morning and afternoon commute to use ICE in HV mode as a heat source for both ways. This method is keeping the A/C load ratio to low 10s and single digit % with much improved EV miles/kWh. Plus overall mpg is slightly better than when I was doing HV in morning and EV in afternoon.

 

Compered to the pic in above comment taken a few days ago, here is a pic from ~1 year ago. My typical Dec-Feb numbers were 3-4miles/kWh with upper 10's to 20's A/C load ratio.

 

@Salamander_King, what kids of speeds are you typically driving on your commutes? Most of my speed limits are between 45-60 with lots of stop and go.

 

My typical commuting speed is ~30mph average, 50mph at max if I don't brake on the steep downhill portion of my commute. The Drive Monitor corresponding to my odometer shows my life time average speed is 34mph over 38K miles.