One of the most frequent questions I get about my Leaf is "how far does it go", or equivalently, "how much electricity does it use?" Both questions hinge on the electrical consumption of the car. "How far does it go" is equal to total capacity (24 kW·h) divided by consumption, and "how much electricity does it use" is equal to your total driving distance times consumption. The leaf expresses electrical consumption by the reciprocal quantity, miles per kW·h, so those are the units I will use as well.
On average, my leaf gets about 4 miles per kW·h, although this can vary greatly with driving conditions and more importantly, driving style. I drive my leaf a lot more conservatively than I drove in my Integra GSR; if I'm not concerned about my range and just drive "normally", this value goes down to about 3.4 miles per kW·h ; conversely, on a good day I can do 4.4 miles per kW·h. That is quite a wide spread, really; your range at 3.4 mi / kW·h is about 80 miles, whereas 4.4 mi / kWh will take you over 100 miles. These values can be further reduced if you use the heater / AC, although a lot of the other electrical components in the car are run off of the lead-acid car battery that the leaf also sports. I don't have a good measure for this sort of secondary draw; in this blog post, I'm just going to talk about driving styles and their effect on consumption.
The leaf's dashboard is shown below. The dash offers a lot of indicators that attempt to give you some idea about the impact of your driving. Unfortunately, most of the controls are confusion or useless--at least at first. Let's dig in and see what we can figure out!
[dash]
Trees / eco mode, power bar, remaining capacity, remaining miles
- Log in to post comments