Day 5 EV Research

12th May 2010 - We are now on day 5 of the EV Research. We were contacted back in January via the G-Wiz Forums by a student at Durham. She is researching how an EV is used in the real world by regular users.

For the research she needs a week long diary including all our electric car use. This is our diary.

Day 5

Wednesday - Lots of short trips again today, which is ideal for an EV.

The Mitsubishi i MiEV was put on charge last night, so first thing this morning the car had a full charge and was showing 84 miles remaining.

Mike had to go into work early 3.30am, but was home by 7.40 ready to help get the children ready for school, total journey 13 miles.

The plan for today was to fully charge the Mitsubishi for each of the journeys to school. On the first journey I was planning to complete the car in drive mode, keep up to the top speed of the roads and not use regenerative braking. On the second journey I was planning to use Eco Mode and Boost Mode (this activates the regenerative breaking more). At the end of the the two journeys I was then going to check the remaining range on the car. This is a fairly simple test but will give you some sort of idea of the different driving styles and how it effects the range of an electric car.

Mike put the i MiEV on charge when he got in from work, but unfortunately for some reason the car did not recharge. The Mitsubishi i MiEV is a pre-production car and the reason for the trial is to sort out any problems with the car. We have had this problem a couple of times before and we had been provided with a new charging cable. This has not solved the problem so we need to get the car look at again by the service engineer. So this will stop me from doing the test this morning.

School run done as normal this morning 2.9 miles.

We have decided to have lunch in Leamington Spa today. The council have had charging points installed in two of their car parks Covent Garden and St Peters. Each has two allocated spaces near to the car park office. You just turn up and ask the office if you can recharge your car and they will unlock the charging point. We have had a few problems with unlocking and locking the charging point so we have contact the manufacturer Pod Point to try and get this fixed. We are planning to meet them very soon to try and sort it out. We do not need to recharge in Leamington Spa, but by using the points it means that the council gets used to using them and they are seen to be used. If the charging points are successful the council are planning to install more.

Leamington Spa journey 14.8 miles in total.

Returned home and put the car back on charge ready for the test.

The Mitsubishi i MiEV now shows 80 miles remaining. I set off on the school run driving as efficiently as possible, using the regenerative braking to slow the car down and keeping the dial in the green 'Eco' as much as possible. The journey to school includes a fairly long steep hill, which going up at 60 MPH will drain the batteries. Today I am going up the hill at a top speed of 45 MPH. This seems to have done the trick. There is not very much traffic on the roads so it is easy driving at the speeds that I want.

The drive home includes a long down hill so this will help to recharge the battery using the regenerative braking to help slow the car down where needed.

On the arrival home the tripometer is now showing 75 miles, this means that we only used 5 miles range on a 5.8 mile trip. Tomorrow we will do the fast drive mode and compare the difference.

The car is now back on charge, on a normal day we would not recharge it, but we want to get the best results for the test.

Total distance driven today is 33.6 miles

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