Thought it would be interesting to post about battery life and general performance on some real world drives. Feel free to add to this thread if anyone else has any data from drives, or any questions to ask.
Today I took a fun and scenic 38 mile drive through the coastal mountains. This drive includes a steep, winding climb from near sea-level to about 3200 feet and back down again, so I was really curious how well the car would perform and how battery life would be. Much of the drive was at 30-45 MPH, except for the last 10 miles or so which was freeway. During the climbing part, about 15 miles into the drive, the estimated range dropped to about 40 miles - it's pretty disconcerting to see the range steadily drop quickly, but totally expected due to the energy required to make it up the hills. The performance of regeneration on the downhill side totally blew me away - at times I was seeing 30KW of power generation as I hit the brakes around the curves, and the battery meter even went up a couple of bars during the descent. I drove fairly conservatively overall, but did punch it a couple of times to pass slower traffic in turnouts on the uphill leg - this thing is like a rocket when you need it. When I got home, the estimated range left was still 75 miles - that's after 38 miles of driving, and the last 10 or so miles on the freeway, at freeway speeds, so the bracket/estimate had time to adjust after the descent. The whole trip was with climate control off, front windows open, and radio on (though I lost satellite through a good portion of the mountains and trees). I only enabled Sport mode for a few minutes on the uphill part, but decided to turn it off for the rest of the trip just to see how well it performed in regular mode. End of trip average was 5.6 miles/KWh.
In the end, I have to say I'm really impressed all around with how it went. I thought this would be a bad scenario for battery life, but it really wasn't aside from the uphill climb, which still exceeded my expectations. The car is really fun to drive through curvy roads and handles well considering it's not built for performance.
Today I took a fun and scenic 38 mile drive through the coastal mountains. This drive includes a steep, winding climb from near sea-level to about 3200 feet and back down again, so I was really curious how well the car would perform and how battery life would be. Much of the drive was at 30-45 MPH, except for the last 10 miles or so which was freeway. During the climbing part, about 15 miles into the drive, the estimated range dropped to about 40 miles - it's pretty disconcerting to see the range steadily drop quickly, but totally expected due to the energy required to make it up the hills. The performance of regeneration on the downhill side totally blew me away - at times I was seeing 30KW of power generation as I hit the brakes around the curves, and the battery meter even went up a couple of bars during the descent. I drove fairly conservatively overall, but did punch it a couple of times to pass slower traffic in turnouts on the uphill leg - this thing is like a rocket when you need it. When I got home, the estimated range left was still 75 miles - that's after 38 miles of driving, and the last 10 or so miles on the freeway, at freeway speeds, so the bracket/estimate had time to adjust after the descent. The whole trip was with climate control off, front windows open, and radio on (though I lost satellite through a good portion of the mountains and trees). I only enabled Sport mode for a few minutes on the uphill part, but decided to turn it off for the rest of the trip just to see how well it performed in regular mode. End of trip average was 5.6 miles/KWh.
In the end, I have to say I'm really impressed all around with how it went. I thought this would be a bad scenario for battery life, but it really wasn't aside from the uphill climb, which still exceeded my expectations. The car is really fun to drive through curvy roads and handles well considering it's not built for performance.