When I drive my car in the morning around 7am to work, My average energy uses 250 to 300 kWh/ mi. But on the same route back at a time around 7 PM, My total usage is only around 150 kWh per mile. Y is that? Thinking it’s related to temperature but in SoCal summers the morning it’s not that cold and same results. Is it due to the battery being more warm at night?
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Energy usage day vs night
- Thread starter moogoo
- Start date
Misterbee
Member
Is there much of a change in elevation in your commute? I drive from the Westside to the Valley to work, and use more energy to get there than I do to drive home. I believe it’s because I live near sea level, and the Valley is several hundred feet higher.
strykeroz
Member
Daskid
Member
Daskid
Member
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Daskid
Member
LOL small world indeed. Had lots of fun with it. But it is time to move on to the future. Sounds like you moved on from the EVO to the Model 3 as well.
Sorry OP for thread jacking.
Holy crap, your car die before you hit the end of the block?
Rothgarr
Active Member
Curious, if you plug the two destinations into GPS and then go into the Energy chart > Trip, is that accurate both ways in estimating your battery level when arriving at your destination?
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
It would only take a 400 foot elevation change to account for the 150Wh/mi vs 250Wh/mi difference. This is not actually that much elevation in the LA area over 13 miles. For example, Eastvale is 200 feet lower than Pomona. The Inland Empire and LA basin are not very flat at all! Can you provide approximate locations of home and work? Winds of course could also be a factor. Traffic can also matter - if you are in heavier traffic one way vs. the other, you’ll do much better in traffic.
Does the commute take the same amount of time in each direction (similar traffic)? Speed is a huge factor too.
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AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
This probably solves the mystery. The Upland hospital (San Antonio Hospital?) is at 1200 feet. Eastvale is closer to 630 feet, depending on exactly where you are at.
For a 4000 pound car, that's 900Wh of potential energy you have to gain over 13 miles (that's the physics based minimum energy required). Realistically that'll take an additional 1kWh over 13 miles, or 77Wh/mi.
On the way back home, you'll regain much of that energy, though not all. So I'd expect a difference of about 150Wh/mi between your morning commute efficiency and your evening efficiency. Your morning commute should have high consumption, and your evening commute should be much lower.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Yes, elevation change is something you become very cognizant of when driving an EV!
Depending on the model, it is about 1.6kWh per thousand feet, for reference. That’s for the AWD.
I always tell people to put rocks in their car when they get to the top of a hill. It’s like free energy - just dump them when you get to the bottom!
You happened to become a case study for a lot of what goes on in this forum for years. New owners come with concerns about some strange new thing that their electric car is doing. They come to find out that it was something that had already been going on for many years, but they never paid attention to these types of things with their gas car, but now that they got a new unusual technological gadget, they are scrutinizing every little thing and discovering all of these different effects that were really there all along.
