Monday, February 16, 2009

Inside Drive

I went out for another drive and this time with my neighbor so he could film while driving. The drive was 22.1 miles round trip. The fastest I took the car was ~70 mph but there was more available so we'll have to see what top speed is one of these days. I did a lot of driving at 65-70 when possible and 45-55 when traffic was slow. Overall I consumed a bit over 7000 Wh for an average of 316.74 Wh/mile. I really need to test this while trying to average 55 mph and taking it easy to see what the best is.

Things still look good even driving at these speeds though. My total pack capacity is 23040 Wh. If I try not to go below 80 DOD that gives me 18432 Wh. If we divide that by 7500Wh to play it safe we get 2.4576. Then multiply that by the 22.1 miles we got gives us a range of 54.3 miles driving at 65 in the hills.

My next long test I believe will be out to my Uncle Duane's house. It's about 30-35 miles away and completely flat ground. Maybe 6 to 10 stop signs along the way so I plan to drive it at 55 mph the whole way and see how the efficiency looks.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very fun to watch. Thanks for sharing. BTW...that road looks very familiar to me. Is that westbound on Highway 120?

Brian said...

108/120 Yep :)

Norm Walker said...

I am wondering if you were able to sell the engine and other components to help with the overall cost.

Brian said...

I haven't tried yet. It's a pretty hot little engine so I can't imagine having trouble selling it. I'll start selling components when I'm complete with the build I think.

Anonymous said...

since the car has a manual transmission, how do you handle stop&go traffic? Do you use the clutch or stay in one gear?

Have you tried launching in higher gears?

Brian said...

I haven't settled on one driving technique yet and it seems there are multiple ways to drive it now and all with their own benefits.

For stop and go it's easiest to just leave it in second gear. You can easily take off and still get to 35 mph. For efficiency, however, you're better off going through all the gears to keep the RPM higher.

I tried taking off in third once but felt the acceleration was worse (at first) than second. I still need to time all these and figure it out. I even accidently was taking off in 4th when I thought I was second. Just doing easy acceleration I didn't notice the difference until I looked down and was expecting much RPM. The motor is just so quiet you have to pay attention. You can lug or over rev easily. What's wrong with lugging the motor? Nothing for short periods of time but this draws higher amps and therefore is creating more heat. Doing this for too long will eventually ruin the motor but you'd have to really be treating it bad. Always starting in a high gear and flooring it for a long time over and over :)