Prius Prime XSE/XSE Premium dismal BEV range

Starting at work using the company vehicles inductive charging Chevy s-10 ev - & having read folks experiences & followed 'em over the years, different manufacturers & different generations of plugin vehicles have consistently run between 8% / 12% charge & discharge loss - in part turning on what the battery temperature is during those charges & discharges.

Side note plugin re 'efficiency' .... 'at the wall' & basing it upon 33kWh.
It's Kind of a theoretical supposition. For example you can't pour a gallon of gas in a 6kW Honda inverter generator & expect to receive 33 KWH as most ICE average around 25% efficiency even though some are better & some are worse.
In the Honda inverter example I don't truly get 25% efficiency - as that 8kWh going into the car traction pack will be reduced a couple times .... from inverter's 240v dc to ac car plug, then - into dc car's traction pack, - only to be reconverted back to three phase AC for the car to actually move forward.

One might consider the efficiency of a new gas turbine power plant ... then line loss over maybe a couple hundred miles, and the Transformers that reduce that 50,000v power - down to whatever voltage your car is charging at. If one's head isn't spinning yet, there was quite a bit of energy spent by the geologist determining where to drill flying around in that helicopter maybe. Then energy maybe drilling a ½ dozen pads, just to get one productive well that might run for 100 million barrels & that amount of energy's potential kwh is amortized over the whole production cycle .... plus energy to cap it & decommission it say for example if it's an offshore platform (+ maintenance of the rig ... example energy for mixed gas compressors for deep divers). Energy to pump the goo into storage vessels, energy to bring it to the refinery, energy from the bunker fuel in the oil tanker, (energy to build that super tanker), energy to clean up massive spills, energy running the refinery, energy trucking it to the gas station & pumping it into the holding tank ... energy to finally pump it into your car. So maybe it's more complete to think of how many BTU's a gallon of gas has after you remove all those variables .... because a kwh of a fuel source has its own variables.
That's not a total list of energy needed to get energy ..... ie cost to build the pumps used at the well site ... building the oil well derek, naturas gas compressors to get fuel to the steam turbines making electricity Etc. Having a simple mind - it's easier perhaps to just think 30kWh .... despite it's long list of "what about's"
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If the 30kWh out of the wall uses less of all that stuff than an equivalent energy output of gasoline, we're coming out ahead in the long run. IMO that's the goal - use less of the natural resources to do the same work (driving a car).
Add to that the reduction in pollution (even with the list above) and we're doing better overall. Long lasting change for the masses comes in baby steps.

But if we go too much further into this topic we may need another thread.......plus I think most of us here don't need a sermon since we are already forward thinking by the very nature of loving and driving a Prius.

 

Interesting data point: I had a 40-mile round trip yesterday, 20 miles each way. I started with a full battery hoping I could do the entire trip in EV. I got there using only 25% of the charge (down to 75%), and got home at 25% of charge. The destination was as a bit lower altitude (Denver ain't flat either) and also the return trip was hot enough I used AC. 90% of it was highway driving ranging from 55-65MPH. I didn't discover the miles/KWh meter until the return trip so no idea what it said for the outgoing trip, but got 4.4m/KWh coming back, so it must have been pretty high going out!

I'm amazed how much a difference changes in altitude make. I knew that from my Gen1 Prius, but this seems like a much bigger delta than I got with the old car. I wonder if a lot has to do with the extra 1,000lbs this car weights vs my Gen1.

Tomorrow is another 100+ mile trip so I'll pay a lot more attention to when the car drops out of EV mode. Barring bad traffic it will be mostly 65-68MPH.

will

 

Gokhan:

Wow, didn't know there was a formula for that! I think I saw something that said my car was 4400lbs, so will scale it. Given I head up over a pass at 9,500 feet and my destination is 8,500 feet, that is a nice number to apply.

will

 

Just to add to an interesting thread; I've had an SE Prime for almost a month, and my experience has been that ev range surpasses expected range. I live at the top of a hill which means that when I leave home, I have about 5 kilometers of mostly downhill before I get to the somewhat level main road. If i have a 100% SOC on the display when I leave home, partly down the hill, the ICE comes on, which I understand to mean that the battery cannot take any more charge, so the engine starts in order to use some of the regenerated power. I don't quite understand this, but what I have been doing is charging to only about 92 - 95 % in order to prevent the ICE coming on when I am driving down the hill. After that, my experience is that for every 1% of SOC used, according to the display, I can average about .8 to .9 kilometers. Interestingly, the SOC drop per kilometer traveled is less at the top of the SOC charge indicator, but increases as the battery SOC drops. However, for a full, or almost full charge, I seem to be able to travel about 85 kilometers before the SOC drops to 0%, including the drive back up the hill to my home. For those not familiar with metric, 85 kilometers is about 52 miles.







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We had a ferry run giving away my old Gen1 to a nephew today. On the 60 mile each-way trip, the trip there was a mix of EV and HV, so not any great data, but for the drive back it was pure HV and the car claimed 55MPG. That involved a 1000-ish foot climb followed by a 1500-ish foot decent, so a net 500 foot drop. That was mostly driving 65-68MPH with AC running the whole time. Yea, I did succumb to the urge to play just a little bit in places, but mostly well behaved. With my Gen1 I could reliably do the round trip (so no net altitude gain) getting 50-52MPG in good weather without AC. So, pretty close to what I got with my 97HP Gen1 but a whole lot more fun and comfortable.

Our 5,000 mile trip starts in late October.

will