Cold weather does impact range considerably

[lutefisk]

This analysis covers Sep 2015 to end 2018 - about 3 1/4 years of data, about 16,000 miles of driving over almost 4,000 trips. My average efficiency for the entire period was 4.55 miles/kWh.

I used the "Electric Rate Simulation" data for my car from the Nissan website that provides daily trips, distance, and electricity information.

I grabbed the daily weather data that provides high and low temperature for the day, then used those data to compute the average temperature for the day.

I can now estimate the impact of temperature on range. Admittedly using a single temperature value for an entire day is crude, and the data from Nissan isn't exactly entirely correct, but I'm just getting a sense of the impact of temperature on range.

The upshot is that yes, cold temperatures have a considerable impact on range. I added the number of miles driven for each temperature range to give an idea of the weighting - I didn't drive many miles when the day's average temp was below 20 F or above 75 F.

 

[LeftieBiker]

Looks like your car has the heat pump.

 

[goldbrick]

Thanks for taking the time to post that. It's a very interesting graph and it's great to see some actual data.

 

[oxothuk]

Admittedly using a single temperature value for an entire day is crude

Not really. The Leaf battery has a lot of thermal inertia so it’s temperature doesn’t change a lot from diurnal variations in ambient temperature

 

[lutefisk]

Admittedly using a single temperature value for an entire day is crude

Not really. The Leaf battery has a lot of thermal inertia so it’s temperature doesn’t change a lot from diurnal variations in ambient temperature

I meant crude in the sense that the ambient temperature during the actual drive isn't necessarily the same as the average temperature for the day. IIRC LeafSpy records that - using LeafSpy for the same kind of analysis would be more accurate.

The car's range is best about 60ºF +/- 15ºF, or 15ºC +/- 8ºC.

 

[lutefisk]

Thanks for taking the time to post that. It's a very interesting graph and it's great to see some actual data.

Thanks!

To be much more pendantic I could use LeafSpy data but that's a lot more work for not much analytical improvement. It's a decent dataset that I may examine more.