EVDRIVER said:
I posted about these comments in the ev haters thread but there was not much attention. These are the worst comments I have ever seen related to EVs and in such a high number. Few people defended the dumb comments.
I'm under the impression that some of these comments are made for political reasons. This being an election year and all. I spent couple of days perusing and answering comments on that Yahoo article. The vitriol and negative sentiment against all things green is palpable. Same can be said of sites like Jalopnik and even boingboing. If this is reflective of the general mood in the electorate, then there might be much less political clout to address environmental issues in the near future.
But back to the topic of gids. If I recall correctly, we
started discussing it last summer, and the thread carried over to this year. My original suggestion was 75 Wh per gid, which was pretty speculative at the time. If a gid really was 80 Wh, then we might have
overestimated the amount of energy left in the battery after turtle. Evnow did couple of
really nice plots and this table for
usable battery capacity. TickTock presented very interesting plots as well, I will try to find and link to them.
Most of the empirical data we have seen so far points to 70 to 75 Wh per gid. Our energy consumption data is derived from the energy economy gauge and the odometer, and it could be wrought with a systemic error. I tried to backcheck the models we came up with several times over the past few months, and I usually wound up with an error somewhere between 3 to 5%. I could never really put my finger on it.
One possible explanation would be drivetrain losses, which is what Gary referred to earlier, I believe. Do you think that these losses are baked into the energy economy figure? That would seem fairly logical to me. I believe that the coulombic efficiency of lithium-ion cells is very high, on the order of 99%. Where else could we lose energy?