I'm thinking of taking the I-PACE on a longer trip around Christmas, does anyone have any experience with highway range at this point? I hear that preconditioning is helpful to get the battery up to temperature, but that driving at 70mph+ reduces efficiency pretty drastically.

 

Here's what I learned from an entirely different EV, but the principle is the same.

• Slow down. The car uses a lot more juice at 70. even 65 will do netter things for your range. 55 is best, but just too slow
• Back roads are your friend. Your range is much better on surface streets than the freeway
• Stop and go traffic is a good thing. If you get stuck in a traffic jam, your range gets better
• Time of day/temperature is huge. Your range is significantly reduced when it is cold out
• One pedal driving is great! Barely use the breaks when you have the car set for regeneration
• ALWAYS CARRY A CHARGER!!! Don't count on ChargePoint or other Public chargers to always be available
• Plan out your charge points in advance. Remember, it will take awhile to charge

I made a few trips that were right near the edge of the range, the most extreme of which took me down to 4 miles remaining. I was sweating it. 55 mph on the freeway, all accessories turned off.

 

How can the range get better in stop/go vs in smoothly flowing traffic? Surely even if the brake regeneration is even 80 or 90pc efficient there still must be some losses. It can't generate energy?
Just curious what the logic is?

 

Its not the stop and go exactly its ths low speed associated with the stop and go. If you never exceed 40 mph with some stop and go you will have greater range than traveling at a steady 60 mph. Just the opposite of a gasoline vehicle. And yes regenerative braking is better than friction braking but you still lose 40% of the energy you put in.

 

Exactly right, unlike a gas car there is no idle penalty which makes the drag penalty, as a percentage of the total higher. Electrics will massively outperform gas cars in traffic as a result. Granted if you pound on the gas (electric) pedal you can overcome this advantage. With gas cars, they get more efficient with speed (thanks to the multiplicative nature of their transmissions) up to the point where air resistance takes that advantage away. Electrics have one gear so the faster you go the faster the drag (both transmission and air) adversely impacts range. Electric motors have a far broader efficiency range in terms of RPMs than gas which is why transmissions just don't make economic sense with them (unless you want to go faster than 120). As a side note, I've been researching how gas stations evolved. Initially, people bought gas at the general store and took it home, then they got tanks at home and got delivery, then pumps moved outside the stores so you could gas up without buying cans of the stuff (and it likely was a ton safer than having a lot of gas in the store) and finally we got gas stations. Until this last folks had to carry gas with them to get between towns and had to have extra tanks installed on their cars for range (given how unreliable these things initially were going long distance in them was kind of iffy anyway). With electrics, we are just short of gas stations (the Tesla Supercharging stations are as close as we get and they are proprietary cost centers not self-funding yet). The regional chargers are more similar to the pumps that were installed outside of general stores. What is hurting us is that we have no Standard Oil installing gas stations all over the place, closest is the effort that VW is being forced to make. I think this is because unlike gas, electricity is from utilities which are regulated and more interested in cutting use than expanding it at the moment thus there is no incentive for them to set up electric car charging stations. Something the industry needs to get behind fixing.

 

OK just picked up my I-Pace drove it 160 miles home had 24 miles left of range but temps were around freezing and a good third of the trip was in mountains. Mostly drove 55 with some places slower and the last 10 miles at 65. The cold really does ugly things to the range. Lane assist is interesting but one of the cameras in front got crap on it and was having a hard time seeing the center line. It was OK except where two lanes merged into one. You could drive with both hands off the wheel long enough to grab something from the back seat or take the top off a soda much longer and it alarmed. Still it made staying in the lane so much easier.

We have the winter package which is heated everything which also likely cut into the range a bit. First service is in 24 months which I appreciate given we'll need to drive that 160 miles again to get the service. Apparently there aren't many Charge Point stations between Bend and Portland, found the PlugShare app to be far more helful in finding a charger (we didn't need one but it made me feel better that they were there). I did find DC 100 AMP chargers on Amazon, but prices ranged from a whopping $9K to around $13K. Not a cheap date. Fun car to drive and once we got Satallite radio working the stereo sounded great. I didn't see the slow response from the screens that others have reported suggesting the software needed tuning and got it before we got the car.

 

About stop and go vs free flowing freeway:

My old commute was 25 miles each way, most of it on the freeway. The first 15 miles were I-80, HOV lane. I would hum along at between 60-75 mph, depending on the traffic. The other lanes were pretty much a standstill. I would use between 25-30 miles of range on that stretch. Once I hit business 80 and there was no more HOV lane, I was in stop and go traffic. I would watch my range increase the whole way to my final destination, to the level that it was as if I used no range for those final 10 miles..As an experiment, I drove the I-80 stretch at 55 mph in the right lane a couple of time. My range use was about 1 to 1 while putting along and once again, was better in the stop and go section.

Hills are worse than the cold in terms of what they do to the range. Cold and hills will have a profound effect on range. The I-Pace has a much better range than my EV did, but if you were to want to drive from S.F. to Lake Tahoe, for example, would technically be withing the range, but you would never make it without stopping somewhere to charge. Lake Tahoe to San Francisco, on the other hand, should be completely doable.

Side note: There is a small subset of EV drivers who get a real thrill out of seeing how far beyond the stated range they could go. On the I-Pace, I wouldn't be surprised if they would be able to eek out 300 miles.