Wow, what a difference the temperature makes!

[x43x]

Wow! I rarely see 40 miles per charge. I average about 38 in the summer and 30 in the winter. I wonder if it is our lower temperatures/short summer, the hilly terrain, or my driving technique that makes my AER less than many are getting.

Good to see another member from Renton. You're right about the hills. We live at the top of Benson, which takes about 4 miles off the charge.

[KC2DQS]

Thanks for the help. Yesterday I was able to get 47.7 miles on a full charge. And today It is estimating 52 miles after driving to work. That will let me drive gas free to and from work. The trick for me was to stay off the express way and use the braking feature of L to slow down till the traffic light changes. I don't think I hit the brakes many time on the way to work. I also have started to precondition the car before driving in the morning. Is there any advantage to preconditioning a car that is parked in a parking lot all day? Now if I only can figure out what to do when winter gets here. Maybe I should transfer to Florida.

[cab]

Driving technics is a factor but speed is a huge one, I agree.

The Volt Road Load curve as seen on graph #3 http://gm-volt.com/2012/08/24/pure-s...he-holy-grail/ says a lot about energy expense vs speed.

Ex: 0.2 Kw.h/mi @50mph vs 0.3 Kw.h/mi @72mph (approx. data extrapolated from the #3 curve)

If you "guesstimate" 10.5Kw.h energy available from the battery for late MY 2012 or 2013 (10Kw.h 2011 & early 2012), it would give you:
10.5Kw.h / (0.2Kw.h/mi) = 52.5 est. mi range @ 50mph
10.5Kw.h / (0.3Kw.h/mi) = 35 est. mi range @ 70mph

Then, imho the next major energy expense is the A/C-heat-defrost-vent things. Sure, your mileage may vary as per above speed & technics but climate control may consume a huge portion of your stored energy but here again, YMMV.

Next winter will be my first one behind the Volt's steering wheel but I'm sure I'll like my heated seat

Good info and this definitely mirrors my experience. I will say that temps above 96 or so seem to be inordinately worse for mileage too. In the 104+ degree days my range was a good 10% worse than 95 degree days. Speed though, as the old ad used to say, kills. However, I just can't bring myself to crawl along some side street at 35-45 mph when I could be cruising at 70+...that's just not going to happen. My best day had me making a much longer commute than usual (went to a different office) with a bunch of city streets.

[Bob G]

drive at 40mph
no jackrabbit starts and lots of L regen stops
climate control to a minimum
do a precondition remote start if you have a L2 charger.

I can get 40+ in AZ with the climate on ECO/Auto

Thanks for the tips! Thinking about this, I realized that my typical driving pattern (over the 6 months that I have had my Volt) is such that I drive about 30 miles on commuting days (not depleting the battery), but when I do use the engine, it usually involves highway miles. Thus, the highway miles make my AER look poorer than average.

With that in mind, I added some local travel on surface streets (below 50 MPH) to my commute today, and to my surprise, by the time that the ICE started, I had gone 46.8 miles! That's a personal record for me (and a good incentive to choose surface streets to highways when possible).

[Bob G]

Another interesting thing that occurred was that when I stopped into a local social establishment featuring frosty beverages after work, my battery was depleted and the ICE was running. After resting for a few hours, my car then indicated 3 miles of remaining AER. I glided 3 miles on electricity and the engine came back on again as expected. Has anyone else experienced this "capacity soak-back" phenomenon? My theory is that the ambient temperature dropped (from 80 to 60 degrees F) as evening approached and the battery cooled down enough to make it feel "peppier" (technical term).

[stephent]

Another interesting thing that occurred was that when I stopped into a local social establishment featuring frosty beverages after work, my battery was depleted and the ICE was running. After resting for a few hours, my car then indicated 3 miles of remaining AER. I glided 3 miles on electricity and the engine came back on again as expected. Has anyone else experienced this "capacity soak-back" phenomenon? My theory is that the ambient temperature dropped (from 80 to 60 degrees F) as evening approached and the battery cooled down enough to make it feel "peppier" (technical term).

No, that's not what happened. In charge-sustaining mode, the battery isn't kept at a fixed level; it fluctuates throughout a range. The gas engine is run at approximately what the electric motor needs, but at lower speeds it tends to produce excess power which is stored in the battery (they want to run the gas engine in an efficient RPM band, too low isn't ideal). Periodically the gas engine will shut down and it will switch back to battery power to draw down the excess (you can see this on the Leaf power flow display); the battery can also be drawn on to provide extra power when accelerating or going uphill. All that happened was you parked at a point where the battery happened to be near the top of the CS range, which is higher than the point where CS kicks in. Powering on/off the car just reset it to CD mode, it didn't remember you were in CS mode before, just goes on the current charge state.

[sinnombre]

The cool weather has helped me too . I was averaging 36-38 miles per charge until a few days ago 43 . Today the weather was cool , bit of rain and heavy traffic and I got 51.9 miles !

[SolarExec]

The cool weather has helped me too . I was averaging 36-38 miles per charge until a few days ago 43 . Today the weather was cool , bit of rain and heavy traffic and I got 51.9 miles !

I was feeling like I might have been "Leafed" for the past eight weeks. With over 25k on the car the range had dropped to 36-38 and one day 32! But as the temps have dropped here in East Texas I was back up to 45 miles last weekend. Whew! I know others are dreading winter but down here we're moving back to ideal Volting weather.