Cruise to a better range!

Is it possible my 2014 Nissan LEAF can drive more energy efficiently than me?  I have been driving for 40 years and spent my old corporate life in the car rental industry driving every kind of vehicle you can imagine.  I taught fuel saving EcoDriving courses, and developed electric vehicle driving training courses for fleet drivers.

When I first started driving electric cars 2 years ago, Mitsubishi loaned us an i-MiEV.  In 2012, it was voted the most efficient electric vehicle on the planet.  If you knew what you were doing with the throttle and regenerative capabilities, you could turn 16 kilowatt hours of electricity into 120 kilometers of range or more.  I think every EV owner should learn to ecodrive on an i-MiEV.  Exacting 120 kilometers of range takes patience and technique.  It helps that the i-MiEV has a very simple “driver coach” display on the dash and excellent regenerative capabilities.  As the i-MiEV trains you to drive energy efficiently, those special energy-saving driving techniques become second nature for an EV driver.  These deft energy-saving skills that convert every electron into forward motion in an i-MiEV, translate very well to improve the range of a LEAF, Focus, i3 and etc.

Last week I had to make a trip to the Georgian College Autoshow in Barrie where Plug’n Drive will host their first EV ride’n drive event with their students.  I am driving up on Highway 11 through the rolling farmland north of the GTA in a 2014 Nissan FEAF at around 85 kilometers per hour (km/h).   The speed limit is 80 km/k, traffic is light, and it is a sunny warm day which is perfect since I am trying to conserve battery for the ride’n drive activity for the students.  I drive the LEAF in B mode the whole time which maximizes the LEAF’s regenerative breaking and ensures I get the best range from the splendid 24 kilowatt hour (kWh) battery.

I don’t use cruise in a vehicle too often, since I like to participate in the driving experience.  However, this time I set it for 85 km/h in the LEAF.  There is an energy coach display which is a series of blue circles that fill the white dots from left to right corresponding to the amount of energy you are suing at any given moment.  As we ascended one of the many hills on this stretch of highway, I noticed the car used precisely as much energy as it needed to maintain the speed I asked for.  Then on the downside of the hill, it regenerated electrons beautifully all while maintaining my speed!  I could not have done it better myself, the car did a better job of using energy than me.  Frankly, I found that a bit disconcerting.  As a driver, it seems that I am being made more and more redundant by the electronic system in cars.

If maximizing the range in your EV is important to you, using the cruise control was a valuable lesson in electron management.  For now, I am still the better driver in the city.  That is, until autonomous cars that talk to each other hit the market.  Google, Toyota, Nissan, Volvo, Tesla (which one of these is not the like other?) and many others are all working on vehicles that can take over from drivers and do either the entire job, or take the humdrum out of stop and go traffic jams or long distance highway trips.  The good news is most of these vehicles are being developed as pure electric or hybrids.  Using clean, plentiful, mostly carbon free electricity that we generate right here in Canada to power our cars is good news for sustainable transportation.  I just hope these new intelligent cars will let me drive from time to time.