First road trip!

Took our first long-ish trip since getting the car today, to a cabane a sucre about an hour's drive out of town.

The trip was about 70km one way, to Sucrerie de la Montagne. We charged to 100% in the morning before church, and was originally hoping to do a quick charge once back on the island which should have been pretty reasonable given the relatively warm weather. However, due to the relatively hilly terrain once we got near Rigaud, we ended up using more power than originally anticipated. Therefore, to play it extra safe we decided to charge at the St-Hubert in Vaudreuil-Dorion on the way home. In the end we drove about 100km before reaching the charger, and had around 30% left so it was erring on the side of caution.

In the warmer weather, we were able to hit a bit over 100 amps on the quick charger, and gained just a bit less than 12 kWh in 27 minutes, giving an average charge rate of about 26kW. This was considerably better than the ~10kW rate we were seeing when it was -10C!

In total we drove 140km that day, and consumed 20kWh of energy, resulting in a round figure of 7.0 km/kWh. Had we not gunned it at 110km/hr during certain highway stretches, I expect the mileage could have been a hair better.

Driving efficiency trends compared to temperature

Because we all like pretty graphs...

Below shows aggregate data from Nissan Connect showing driving efficiency vs average monthly temperature. Temperature was taken from weatherunderground for the Downtown Montreal station, and represents the average value for the month.

The graph should be automatically updated as more data is entered... so expect more points to appear as time goes by!

Leg room in the back? Yes please!

I hope to not do this too often in the future (as its a huge pain to get in and out of the car), but this shows how much room you have in the back of the car, at least for relatively small folks like us (I'm 5'7" and the wife is 5'6"):

Whats perhaps more impressive is that I'm able to squeeze between the two child seats. The Foonf on the right is super slim, but the bucket seat on the left kinda flows over a bit.

Probably do not want to be in the middle during a side impact... So we're working on convincing the older one that the other parent needs to keep the driver company up front.

Survived our first winter...

You hear stories of losing up to 40% of range in winter (possibly true if you like to keep a toasty cabin and drive on the freeway), but for our relatively short commute, this was not our biggest issue of our first winter with an EV.

Our greatest challenge so far was actually accessing our parking spot behind our house this winter. We had an extraordinary amount of snow this year (the city ran out of the budgeted 5 snow removal operations, and also had to approve an additional dump site). Here are some shots of our back lane.

Easter Weekend, and it looks like winter might finally be behind us! Here's a view of our back lane on Easter Monday:

A few weeks ago in mid-March, when hope was in sight:

Early March, the last (hopefully) big snow dump of ~20-30cm. Our daughter helping out:

I may want to invest in a snow blower next year... both myself and my visiting parents spent quite a few evenings outdoors this winter doing this:

Another shot from earlier on in the winter. Note the big pile on our deck, as it is supposedly illegal to move snow from rear parking spots onto public property. (As far as we know, clearing the back lane is A-OK and we have not heard back from the city saying otherwise)

Next up: swapping on the summer tires to see how much they change in efficiency!

Conversion Efficiency, March 2018

Details from this post.

After another complete month of driving, here are the numbers for March 2018:

Efficiency: 83%
Total Grid in:  157.4 + 22.6 (public) = 180kWh
Total Battery Out: 150 kWh
Average Temperature: -1C
Kilometers Driven: 995km
Grid to road km/kWh:  5.53 km/kWh
Battery to road km/kWh: 6.63km/kWh
Charging days: 13 (once every 2.4 days)

No definitive reasons why the efficiency is up slightly, but one potential reason is that we've been charging to 100% less often. It's a bit difficult to keep a tally on that one...