Recent content by kidjan

It's about 47 miles, round-trip. Total ascent/descent is actually about ~5800 ft, because there's some ups and downs on the way there. Interestingly enough it looks like there's an alternate route for me that'd be more like ~5100 ft, but about five miles longer. Now I'm curious what sort of...

Interesting--I live in Salt Lake, have a 2015 S. Just the other day I left my house at 4300ft elevation with 100% battery, and drove up to Alta (~8400ft elevation). When I got there, I had ~38% battery left. On the way down the canyon, I regen'd about 15% battery, so exited the canyon with...

I don't understand that either; plenty of companies fit full-featured bluetooth capabilities in a form factor dramatically smaller than that. Or, translation: if nissan made a blue-tooth enabled cell phone, it'd be twice the size of a VHS tape???

That....is really weird. I don't understand what all of that hardware is for; also, that TI chip has really bizarre stuff like a DSP core that includes video stuff (???). I'm also baffled why this thing has to live in the trunk???

...is that entire metal box dedicated only to bluetooth??? Or is it just the black box affixed on the outside? If it's the entire box, that seems....kind of excessive

My wife and I are both bewildered anybody thought this thing a valuable addition to the car. It's kinda cutesy, but I'd prefer the car just be ten bucks cheaper (or however much it costs to add that thing) and I don't have any visual spew in my view.

I've never been bothered by the shifter direction. All sorts of cars have shifters that move in directions that aren't related, so... :roll:

I'm really not trying to talk about going down hills--I never was, and I'm really unclear why people are talking about driving technique in this thread at all. My only point: aerodynamic efficiency impacts regen, and I suspect much more than people realize.

Sure you can. We can all acknowledge faster = more drag = less efficient, and that's about all there is to talk about. It really isn't relevant to a thread about improving the car's aerodynamics.

Also, "Using regen doesn't change the energy lost to drag" is _not_ my argument. That's your argument. My argument is you can get more out of regen by improving aero. That's always been my argument.

Coasting is not the correct answer when you have a huge amount of potential energy available to you in the form of elevation gain. Tell you what: let's do an experiment. You coast down parleys, and I'll regen down parleys, and we'll see who ends up with more battery at the bottom.

Also, what I'm talking about is completely observable if I compare Little Cottonwood Canyon with Parleys. Parleys is on I-80; speed limit is 70 mph. Speeds under 55 are unsafe. As a consequence of this, it's hard to maintain a safe driving speed and have significant regen because so much is...

I understand your point now. Still, we're talking about aerodynamic efficiency. If I'm going down parleys canyon (roughly twelve miles of travel, ~2500 feet drop) the optimization you're describing isn't noteworthy. 11.5 miles of regen is going to dwarf what you're talking about. And...

I'm really unclear what point you're trying to make. The bottom line is wind resistance is wasted energy that could have been put into regen in many instances--for example going down a long mountain pass--hence the thread on improving aerodynamics.

I can't believe people are still debating this. I play cards with a climate scientist; he recently co-authored an editorial in the local paper: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/5066614-155/op-ed-human-caused-climate-change-is-real - scientific consensus at this time among climate scientists is...