No, It’s Real: EV Range Down

My wife and I prefer driving without gloves, despite the Minnesota cold. So, the heated feature is great.

 

I had to sit on my hands when I realized I bought the plus.

 

temperature?

 

Spring time? Oh, wait! You are in TX. Our morning temp is still in low 20s, yet finally I am starting to see above 25 miles on GOM. Today was 26 miles for the first time in 4-5 months.

 

After 14 months and 15k miles, looks like the battery capacity has lost a bit. Yesterday I was able to achieve 5mile/kWh, and I got just 24 miles with 3 miles EV range left. With 5mile/kWh, I used to get 30 miles. The charging time is still 5 hours and 30 min or even 5 hours and 50 min.

However, it is still not warm enough. It was close to 60F yesterday. I will report back when it reach 70F.

 

I think charge time and miles per kWh can both indicate the battery capacity. My wife and I usually get 4-5 miles per kWh.

 

Since I owned a Prius PHV for 5 years prior to getting my Prius, there was a well established pattern already... which still remains true. In that regard, I have some very consistent data to share.

Here's before & now comparison video. It's the same drive, 2 years and 29k miles later:

Notice how close the results are. It's an interesting record of experience. I plan to capture the same drive yet again with kWh consumption data and an even closer match to time & temperature.

Long story short, real EV range is not down based on my detailed ownership observations.

 

The same is true with our 2014 BMW i3-REx and was true with our former 2017 Prius Prime. As for our 90 day old, 9,152 mile, Standard Range Plus Model 3, no EV range loss has been detected.

Bob Wilson

 

That recent update to the app has me yearning to capture that drive again. Having a gauge now that displays a total kWh consumption/regeneration value is quite empowering... so much so, it will kill threads just like this one from going on and on without certainty.

I'm at the coffeeshop now, the quarter-way mark, looking at the resulting captured data. It's 7 degrees cooler and I got hit by an extra stoplight, so battery capacity (actual) was at 70% rather than the 72% in the video. (That's an estimate of 79% rather than 80%.) It's all real-world data regardless. The more, the better. In this case, that's 23% of EV capacity available (87%-13%=74; 17/74=23%) The value shown for consumed/regened overall for the drive was 1.215 kWh. Now, this is where things got messy...

I consistently measure 5.75 kWh as a "full" charge from my JuiceBox. That's a complete restoration of EV capacity, including losses from charging and whatever overhead there may be for cycling overhead during the charge and excluding sessions that pre-condition. Some would argue that's not the entire usable EV capacity based on the 8.79 kWh measure of the cells all added up. But my drive often doesn't end as fully depleted (13%), despite being in HV mode. That's due to the long regen I experience just prior to turning into my neighborhood. Sometimes, it's enough to actually show a little bit of EV available. But we know that low values (such as 0.8 mile) will often be suppressed from display. So, you must have an aftermarket gauge to really know what SOC the battery is actually at. But then again, a single percentage point that's truncated falls into margin-of-error territory. With all that being said, I could use a higher value as the measure of "full" for EV capacity. But including a from-the-plug value makes no sense when you are only measuring against consumption/regeneration results. So, I stick with 5.75 kWh.

So doing the calculation.... 23 of 5.75 is 1.322 which is not 1.215 kWh. However, it's close enough. We have a means of collecting & analyzing data that's more comprehensive than in the past. Combined with consistent capture approach, it's as accurate as you can get in real-world conditions.