that1deadguy said:
I just ordered the ELM 327 from Amazon. .. $10
Good move. This will give you way more confidence in what you have left in your car once you get down to lower charge over the instrumentation in the LEAF. What Android device do you have/are you going to get? Quite a few of us have the Kyocera Event from Virgin Mobile...it usually ends up on sale for not much more than $25 and remember that you don't need to register it as a phone and take out a contract with Virgin just to use it as an Android device.
Quite a bit here, you will here us talk about "The Gid". The Gid is a measurement of charge, named after our very own Gary Giddings, which is used in LEAF Spy (and the other devices that came before it) to figure out how much energy is left in your battery. You can actually drive the LEAF down all the way to just before Turtle at full highway speeds, so long as you know when Turtle is going to hit. The instrumentation in the 2011 and 2012 LEAF does not offer you this information in anywhere near enough granularity.
3.3 Gids is roughly worth about a mile of careful driving. Your mileage may vary with driving style, terrain, weather conditions, etc... A new 2011/2012 LEAF would have ideally had 281 Gids, or about 85 miles worth of careful driving. My car currently has anywhere from 190-210 Gids (it's not a constant), so anywhere from 57-63 miles with careful driving. When I was in the same position as you with my car - around 30 months in with a capacity bar lost - I was at around 222 Gids, which is around 67 miles with careful driving.
Careful driving for me is ECO mode exclusively, not exceeding 65mph; with weather and terrain conditions that are favorable (good weather, flat ground), and I can drive down to about 13 Gids and feel pretty comfortable, knowing that Turtle occurs at 6 Gids and 13 Gids gives me a 2 mile cushion. By then, I really want my pre-trip planning to have me a stone's throw away from the next charging opportunity.
I am certain that once you see that as you reach --- on your available miles display, you will actually see that you have quite a few miles of driving available to you. :mrgreen: