My Nissan Leaf Forum

It's not that they suffice, but they will allow you to remain comfortable with somewhat less cabin heating,all else being equal. Everyone's tolerance for cold is different, of course. Dressing warmly is another way to reduce the amount of cabin heat you need to stay comfortable. Depends on the accommodations you and your partner willing or able to make. I'm not prescribing a solution, just trying to illustrate the options since cabin heating was a major cause of your reduced range and using seat heating and/or dressing warmly can mitigate that somewhat. If your partner is either unwilling or unable to do either, then it sounds like you have a good option in the Prius.

Best wishes.

I purchase this, even with the lousy reviews, just to give it a try. You just need to remember, that 15Ax12V=180W or less than two 100 W light bulbs. Using gorilla glue, I mounted mine under the glovebox, for a semi-permanent installation. It works fairly well as an "auxiliary" passenger only heat source, mostly keeping the feet warm. I bought it for a 60 mi RT winter (32 F) trip that would have been very unpleasant without heat. We ended up charging L1 for an hour at dinner and that gave us the extra charge to blast the heat on the way home.

Yes, sounds like a stressful trip and you will definitely need to "plan" more with the Leaf than the Prius. Still, with planning and getting used to how the car consumes electricity, you will be able to adjust the speed and always arrive home with "just enough".
Reddy

Here's what I'be found: if you have climate control "off" and re-circulation set, you can simply press the front defogger button to turn it on and if you press it again, it returns to CC off, re-circulate. However, if you change any settings while the defogger is on, this will not work and you end up with CC on.

Actually I must correct this : the average was 3.4 miles/kWh for 12/24 .

I just got the data for the last trip on 12/25 :

13.9 miles at 3.1 miles/kWh . Consumption of 4.4 kWh . Travel time 0.4 hours.
This was the stretch that I drove from the theater to home at 2am, limiting freeway speed to 50 mph.
Obviously the heat was on as well as defogger, and it included the steep hill at the end. But I was driving in ECO and with cruise control on the freeway.
Guess the combo of heat + hill is a really lethal one.



I got 3.1 miles/kWh average with the heater on, and the uphill. There was about 10 miles of freeway at 50mph and under 4miles of city streets at lower speeds.
So unfortunately the 4.8 miles/kWh number on flat/no heat at 50mph is not very meaningful when the heater and uphill have that much impact on the energy usage.

Thanks, Tony. These are all good to know, but without accounting for hills and heat it is unfortunately not very useful. Those really bring the averages down quite a bit.

I just looked at my Carwings data for the month of December. I only have one day where I exceeded 4 miles/kWh average.

That was Dec 6 . I only drove 12.9 miles. 4.2 miles/kWh. My guess is this was probably downhill 1-way commute to work only and no heat.
Some days I work from home and I frequently come home after midnight when I commute, hence low number of miles for that day.

My average for December is 3.2 miles/kWh.

Worst day was last sunday, december 23. Only 4.1 miles, late night roundtrip to the nearest grocery store with the heat and defogger on.
Average 2.3 miles/kWh . Top speed was probably 35 mph, and no freeway involved.

do you normally park in a garage? because it does not sound like it. you might want to try to toggle defrost on for only as long as it takes to clear the glass and take advice from someone who lives with 6+ months of 99% humidity EVERY morning. get yourself a decent squeegee with at least a 3 foot handle.

I come out from work and have moisture on my windows so thick that it takes a good 5 minutes of defrost on high fan to even begin to clear the glass. I found it to be a much better use of my time and battery to turn on defrost, swipe the windows so I can see and take off.

Yes, I have to swipe every minute or two driving down the road and you might want to practice that in a parking lot first or have a passenger do it for you. dont take chances but I find that this helps a ton.

My car is always in the garage when at home since that's where I charge it.
I don't need to turn on the defogger right away, I just drive off. I only turn it on when fog starts to form on the windshield.



When at work, my car is in an open parking lot. Sometimes it does take a few minutes with the defogger to clear up the windshield late at night. The humidity is not close to 99% here though.

Actually, it is relevant. If you had only slowed down (and did nothing else) for the entire trip (but mostly the freeway part), whether there were hills or not, you would have increased your range in approximately a percentage of the above.

Instead of coming home with X miles left, it would have been X + a bunch of miles.

If you look in my first post, you will see that I slowed down to 55 and 50 for 2 of the freeway trips I reported. Even for the slowest 50 mph trip, it was determined through Carwings that the average was only 3.1 miles/kWh, not 4.8 . So, what I am saying is that the other factors - the uphill and the heater - trump the speed in terms of energy consumption with the Leaf.

I honestly don't think I could have ended up with too many more miles left at the end by slowing down. I already slowed down for the last 2 trips, as low as was reasonable to drive on a freeway. Slowing down below 65 for the first trip would have meant less L1 charging afterwards. Slowing down below 65 for the second trip might have meant missing dinner. It seems turning off the heat completely would have had a much larger impact on the energy consumption.

When it's in the single digits here my heater uses around 3kw to maintain the cabin on auto. San Jose isn't that cold so you should use less. The difference between the 4.8 you should have seen and the 3.1 you saw indicates a very high heater draw. Is it so hilly that the hills explain away the difference? Or perhaps your heat is on max because of the defog instead of auto?

For example my commute is 60-65 mph and 3kw heater and I average 3.1m/kwh.