Peak sans Oil in my Nissan Leaf April 28, 2013 Mark D Larsen

2nd Pine Valley Day Trip (Click to enlarge)

Just a few weeks after taking delivery of my Leaf, we decided to put its range to the test by driving up to the town of Pine Valley, high in the mountains to the north of our home. The test seemed daunting: an ascent of more than 3,000 feet to the alpine village, nearly 40 miles away. I was pleased to see that my spanking new EV handled the challenge with aplomb —with a few miles to spare.

Now that my Leaf is over a year old, I decided to repeat the experiment. I set the timer to charge the battery to 100% overnight, we packed a picnic lunch, and piled into Ohm My for a leisurely Sunday drive up to the ponderosa pines. Rather than wax as pedantic as usual, I’ll let the following pictures convey their thousands of words to highlight the journey.

Wake me when we get there (Click to enlarge)	Elephant skin sandstone formations (Click to enlarge)
Extinct (we hope!) volcanoes (Click to enlarge)	Rustic mountain cabin...?! (Click to enlarge)
Made in the shade (Click to enlarge)	Time for a picnic (Click to enlarge)
Top of the dash dashboard (Click to enlarge)	All the way home (Click to enlarge)

Today’s trip was not an exact duplicate of the first one nearly a year ago. This time we drove a few miles farther, and about 400 feet higher, to the campground in the Dixie National Forest to enjoy our picnic by the small reservoir. Conversely, we also did not take a detour in the town of Veyo to visit a natural spring resort on the return trip. And this time we used the air conditioner for most of the journey, only turning it off when the temperatures were below 75°F in Pine Valley. Consequently, the above dashboard readouts do not match last year’s results, and thus would not constitute a fair comparison of battery capacity.

On the left above is the readout after arriving at the campground parking lot. You can see that we had traveled 39.1 miles. The steep climb had gobbled up 9 of the 12 charge bars, at 3.3 miles-per-kWh, and the Guess-O-Meter estimated that we only had 21 miles worth of charge left. A driver uninitiated in the quirks of that gauge would have probably panicked at that point, but I knew very well that regenerative braking on the descent back home would increase the meter’s guesses while putting electrons back into the pack.

On the right above is the end result. Just as I had anticipated, when we pulled into the garage again, only one more charge bar had disappeared, leaving just the two red ones, and the GOM now predicted 14 miles of range remaining, i.e., merely 7 less than at the campground! Adding that guess to the odometer’s 78.1 miles gives a total theoretical range of... 92.1 miles for the 100% charge. Given that the elevation change to reach Pine Valley was nearly twice the altitude of our home, and that we ran the climate control most of time, I am frankly astounded by that result. I am even more impressed that the miles-per-kWh for the entire trip was 5.4 —still the same average Ohm My achieved for the first year of ownership.

Sunday outings to commune with nature are always delightful, but even moreso when driving a clean, efficient EV!