Part 3 - Jan. 26- Feb. 2, 1999 (Extended Test)
Having gotten the casual playing and poking around
the car out of the way, we were now ready to see how the
car (and charging) would do in "normal" use as
defined by our routine commuting (keeping up with
traffic at 65 MPH, or sometimes creeping along through
rush hour congestion).
You can jump to our detailed notes
(probably mostly of interest to current EV1
drivers) but the bottom line is that GM's range
estimates for the car appear to be pretty accurate
for our normal commuting. It should be easy to
exceed 120 miles, and fairly routine to hit 140
miles. With careful driving, it should be
possible (for me) to hit 160. Any driver really
trying hard for the maximum range should be able to
go even farther. For any 1997 EV1 drivers
wondering how far they could typically go with the
NiMH version, I'd say just double your current
numbers.
We saw a few long charging cycles, but most seemed
to complete by morning. Since it is no problem to
interrupt a leveling cycle, it shouldn't put any
additional restrictions on us.
Because our test drives were all done during cold
(or cool) periods, warm weather performance is
still a question which really won't get an answer
for 6 months or so. But one thing we anticipate is
that we will be wanting to watch the temperature
of the battery pack. This is not just out of
curiosity. We can easily imagine a situation
which might heat the batteries up. In this case
we'd want to use the temperature to decide when to
stop and take a break and try to charge up.
However, since the temperature is not displayed
and apparently can't be displayed without altering
the display hardware, we suggest to GM that they
modify their software to allow the temperature to
appear on their serial data bus where it can
be read and displayed using external programs some
of the drivers have created.
Portable Charger Compatibility
One final item of note is that I did try the 120V
charger on the NiMH car. It turns out that the
car will charge, though as one would expect, it
would take a very long time to fully charge a NiMH
car if it started out empty. Occasionally I
checked in on the charger to find that the
charging had stopped with the red fault light on.
Perhaps this was due to the car attempting to
request more power when cooling. If so, then
carrying around the portable charger will not
do any good, so we can see why it's not included
on the NiMH cars. NiMH drivers will have to bug
their employers to put in real (240V) chargers as
the 120V sockets won't do them any good. On the
other hand I suspect most NiMH drivers won't care.
Summary
The 1999 EV1 is a significant improvement over
the 1997 model, and as far as range is concerned,
GM delivers with the NiMH battery. More is
definitely better! It's time to upgrade that 486
to a Pentium!
|