There are some different options for getting to work and back. There's a 25 mile one way route on back roads and a 30 mile highway route on the Mass Pike and 128. I tend to leave between 5:15 and 5:45am so there's no traffic on either. The highway will take me about a half hour and the back roads 45 minutes or so.
Coming home in the afternoon is a different story. I often leave between 3 and 3:30. The highway will still take me 30 to 35 minutes because rush hour traffic hasn't started yet. The back roads through Bedford, Concord and Sudbury centers however can take an hour ten, hour fifteen. Note that when I ride my road bike the same route I can do it in an hour twenty.
Anyway, what I've been doing recently (pre LEAF) is take the back roads in the morning and the highway in the afternoon. So I thought that's what I'd do yesterday. What a difference the back roads make. I rarely get above 40 on them and know from cycling it many times that it's a pretty flat route. Here's what I started with:
And here's what I ended up with once I got there.
I started with a range of 88 and ended up with 74 after driving 25 miles giving me an effective range of 99 miles.
And here's where I ended up after the commute home which consisted of about 27 miles actually on the highway doing 60 to 70mph (a bit slower than my prior 75 to 80mph) and then another 10 miles of local roads getting home and running an errand.
So in the end I have 21 miles left with 62 driven giving me a very respectable 83 overall miles of range. But that means the highway driving lost me 16 miles of range so what's the effective range of the highway alone? This will require a flashback to some high school math methinks.
Let's call a 99 mile equivalent mile 1 UoR (unit of range). So each of my back road miles = 1 UoR. For the purposes of this exercise we're going to assume that the 10 local miles each used 1 UoR. Since I ended up at the end of the day at only 83 total miles of range (62 miles driven + 21 left) I must have used more than 1 UoR for each highway mile. The number of UoRs of highway driving is the 27 driven plus the overall change in effective range, 16 (99 - 83), or a total of 43 UoRs. That gives us a ratio of 1.59 UoRs of highway over back roads (43 / 27). If that's the case then our total possible highway range will be 62 miles (99 / 1.59).
Might be pushing it for Kerry's commute which is 62 miles and includes 40 miles of highway. Guess we'll be finding out soon. Fortunately Milford Nissan is on her way home and they have a 400V super charger!
BTW, I’ll be happy if someone can check my math and make sure I did it right.
One final thing to note. The temperature was in the 30s and I didn't use much climate control except for the heated seats and steering wheel.
Yesterday's Statistics
- Description: Thanksgiving. Lots of eating. No driving.
- Starting Range: 71 miles
- Miles Driven: 00 miles
- Ending Range: 71 miles
- High Temperature: 32
- Low Temperature: 21
- Wind: 9
- Average MPKWh: 3.9
- Average MPG: 24.5
- Energy Cost/KWh (Wind): $0.0899
- Delivery Cost/KWh: $0.092
- Unleaded Regular/Gallon MA: $3.421
- Savings/Mile: $0.000
- Total Savings: $0.00
- Lifetime Savings: $16.74
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