Driving range display 'changes' after NTB11038 Svc Campaign

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My observations after the service:

SOC: 80% (timer charge)
A/C: off
headlight: off
speed: 40 mph max (city)

I got 3 bars gone after 12 miles! That's pretty much insane.
I used to have the first bar to go after at least 5+ miles. Sometimes even after 10.

Does it mean I will have just 48 miles of total range under conditions above? (Those that Nissan claims 130 miles distance for?)
 
MrFish said:
Now by my simple math a 24 kw battery with 12 bars on the gauge = 2 kw per bar and assuming 13 bars with a "hidden" bar = 1.8 kw/bar.

Now I just did a 50 mile test trip and the dash trip meter shows 3.5 miles/kw so I used 14 kw, however I used 10 bars which 14kw/10=1.4kw/bar.

At that rate the full 12 bars x 1.4 kw would mean Nissan is limiting the battery to 16.8 kw and using the 13 bars theory would be 18.2kw.
I asked somewhere recently if anyone knows for sure what the "Average" on the dash Energy Information Display is based on.
  • Is it being calculated from the total energy being drawn out of the battery? If so, I agree your analysis raises serious questions.
  • Or is it being calculated based on the energy flow being seen at the motor? In that case, other energy uses such as climate control, lights, etc. could account for at least part of the missing energy.

Ray
 
I would guess it's non-linear now. I really don't think the overall range has changed any, just the reporting of it. All signs now seem geared to scare you so you don't push it. My gas gauge was never linear either, the first tick or two always disappeared faster than the others. The engineers in most of us is really coming out here as we struggle to reverse-engineer the new algorithm. :lol:
 
GeekEV said:
I would guess it's non-linear now. I really don't think the overall range has changed any, just the reporting of it. All signs now seem geared to scare you so you don't push it. My gas gauge was never linear either, the first tick or two always disappeared faster than the others.

With my Civic GX, I could go 130-150 miles before the needle moved off of 'F'. Then after it reached just past half (300 or so), it would drop like a rock. When the low fuel light came one, I always had a minimum of 50 miles. One time I stretched that to 68 just to see how far I could go. I won't be doing that with the LEAF.
 
Spies said:
If this is indeed the case it certainly looks like the 12 bar SOC display has been shifted a full bar or even more with the update. To me it seems like after the update there are now 13 bars total instead of 12 with the bottom bar being invisible. If this is indeed the case I can change my behavior accordingly and rely more on the low battery and very low battery than the bars until I get used to the changes. Do these assumptions seem reasonable? Once again if Nissan would just tell us what they changed it would make things a lot easier.

I'm sorry I find this whole conversation rather hilarious. There is no "invisible bar". These bars aren't physical things. It's a display! It's a dial. That's it!

This is the famous Spinal Tap scene in real life!

"This one goes to 11"

"Why not just make 10 louder and then go to 10?"

"This one goes to 11."

There are no physical bars! There is no spoon!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0wm3JwXbLs
 
jason98 said:
SOC: 80% (timer charge)
A/C: off
headlight: off
speed: 40 mph max (city)

I got 3 bars gone after 12 miles! That's pretty much insane.
Just to be clear: You are saying you had 10 bars when you started and only 7 bars after driving 12 miles? That does sound pretty insane, and might suggest there will be another service upgrade in our future.

But it's not quite as bad as you might think. Using the Spies 13-bar hypothesis the 8th bar should disappear at 61.5% SOC. (It used to go off at 60% SOC.) So that means you have used 18.5% of the battery for 12 miles, which is a 100% range of 65 miles. That's pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as 24% (three bars at 8% each) for 12 miles, which would be a 100% range of only 50 miles.

This points out once again the confusion that arises from having such an imprecise SOC indicator. Under the published scheme, when you start out with an 80% charge your 10th bar is only "half full". So you should expect it to disappear in 3 or 4 miles.

Ray

P.S. on latest posts. I'm not willing to agree that it is nonlinear. That's quite normal for analog gauges, but makes for unnecessarily complex programming with digital computations.
 
cdub said:
I'm sorry I find this whole conversation rather hilarious. There is no "invisible bar". These bars aren't physical things. It's a display! It's a dial. That's it!
Fine. May I suggest, then, if you are ever out driving and the 12th bar disappears, you stop immediately wherever you are, rather than chance insanity as your brain contemplates depending on something that doesn't exist. :shock:

Ray
 
planet4ever said:
P.S. on latest posts. I'm not willing to agree that it is nonlinear. That's quite normal for analog gauges, but makes for unnecessarily complex programming with digital computations.

Isn't Lion by it's very nature nonlinear? So this is normal.
 
planet4ever said:
I'm not willing to agree that it is nonlinear. That's quite normal for analog gauges, but makes for unnecessarily complex programming with digital computations.
It may not be, but programming that is dead easy. You simply have a 12 bucket array which stores the bottom threshold for each bar. The calculations would be done once, by hand. When the SOC changes, you just scan the array to see which bucket it falls into and light up that many bars...
 
planet4ever said:
This points out once again the confusion that arises from having such an imprecise SOC indicator. Under the published scheme, when you start out with an 80% charge your 10th bar is only "half full". So you should expect it to disappear in 3 or 4 miles.

That would be great but every subsequent bar consistently took around 4 miles to disappear. Suddenly I know the meaning of "range anxiety"
Also forgot to mention that my miles per kwh was 4.9.
So what I have now for my 4 miles per bar at 5 miles per kwh:
1. around 50 miles of total range
2. 10 kwh of usable energy???
 
Based on what I have read to date, I believe I will be sitting out this "update." I have a very good mental picture of exactly what the bars mean to me and my driving ranges, and I really don't want to have to try and recalibrate all that in my head...
 
GeekEV said:
I decided to take one for the team and see how low it will go, post update.
Thank you for doing this test. It definitely proves that the SOC bars no longer represent the actual SOC. This is very unfortunate and I definitely want an OBD gauge now to provide that actual percentage.

Since you didn't keep track of the mileage as each SOC bar went off, it's difficult to tell how much they changed it by, but on the surface it appears I could be fairly close with my estimate...
 
mogur said:
Based on what I have read to date, I believe I will be sitting out this "update." I have a very good mental picture of exactly what the bars mean to me and my driving ranges, and I really don't want to have to try and recalibrate all that in my head...

If our guess on the update is correct, you might want to upgrade and readjust your thinking....because with the revision 1 gauges, if you miscalculate your range and find yourself 10 miles from your destination showing 10 miles, you stand a very real chance of walking that last mile. After the update, when you see 10 miles left, you in all likelihood have 15. Not something to COUNT on, but I'd rather have a bit of range-anxiety that has a small reserve than be blissfully ignorant of how close to walking I may be from time to time.

As always, YMMV.
:lol:
 
I prefer to see what I actually have rather than having some mystery and unknown amount remaining. I have enough experience and data with the car and bar graph now that I can evaluate and modulate my driving to the point that I can reliably get home (or wherever I need to go) with 8-10 miles or so still showing if necessary, and I frequently do. All that will go out the window with the new scheme apparently... Maybe if they told us what they actually changed and how, I might be a little more receptive.

This makes me want a REAL SOC meter even more!

Jimmydreams said:
mogur said:
Based on what I have read to date, I believe I will be sitting out this "update." I have a very good mental picture of exactly what the bars mean to me and my driving ranges, and I really don't want to have to try and recalibrate all that in my head...

If our guess on the update is correct, you might want to upgrade and readjust your thinking....because with the revision 1 gauges, if you miscalculate your range and find yourself 10 miles from your destination showing 10 miles, you stand a very real chance of walking that last mile. After the update, when you see 10 miles left, you in all likelihood have 15. Not something to COUNT on, but I'd rather have a bit of range-anxiety that has a small reserve than be blissfully ignorant of how close to walking I may be from time to time.
 
MrFish said:
This makes me want a REAL SOC meter even more!

X2

Even my phone has that. What are they trying to hide?

Nissan apparently made a decision that they could better predict our future power consumption with a clever algorithm than we could with the computer that's between our ears. Unfortunately, the computer that's between our ears actually knows where we are going, and how fast. :roll:

Here's hoping Turbo2ltr will have an add-on SOC gauge for us some time in the future.
 
It's been pretty well established now that number has nothing to do with the firmware update. Despite what some peoples service receipt says, our numbers did not change at all in the diagnostic screen.
 
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