Yesterday we repeated our January 6, 2015 trip to Bird Springs to see the wildflowers at our friends Lucy and Clyde. See Trip to Bird Springs Road in a Nissan Leaf.
This time we picked up two friends, doubling our passenger load, but this time we drove directly to our destination. Last year I’d made a mistake in programming our GPS and we spent a few more miles wandering around until we found the right gate.
We arrived with 55% charge remaining as opposed to last year’s 51%. We returned home with 34% State of Charge, slightly more than the 32% SOC during last year’s trip.
I estimated that last year we used 15 kWh for the trip. This year it appears we used only 13 kWh.
Nevertheless, in either case it appears that EVTripPlanner underestimated the charge needed by nearly 20%. This is not an insignificant error for today’s mass-market electric vehicles with limited traction battery capacity.
