Having been driving a Leaf (sorry Trevor) for the last 5 months or so, I can confirm that range depends on many, many things – not quite whether there is an “r” in the month or not, but not far off!

I have found this document helpful

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35284720/postfiles/leafcharts/LEAFrangeChartVersion7G100.pdf

perhaps in time something similar will appear for the Zoe?

I recently did a trip to Ben Chonzie and got to the destination with 8 miles of range left on the Leaf range guess-ometer (1 range bar), with the nearest charger 20 miles away (a bit silly, I know!). But, knowing that I was at a much higher elevation than the charger, that the range estimate was a guess based upon recent driving i.e. going uphill rather than down and that I could travel quite slowly on the road back to the charge point, I was confident that there wouldn’t be a problem. And there wasn’t. By the time we had come back down the single track access road (after climbing Ben Chonzie and with lots of regeneration) the range guess had gone up to 12 miles with 17 miles to the charge point. The rest of the journey was at about 35 mph to try to get good range without being too anti-social. With 2 miles left to the charge point, the range at 3 miles now exceeded the distance left to go. We got to the charge point, plugged in and went for dinner before returning home.

However, having got away with it this time, I wouldn’t like to sail quite so close to the wind in future!

I’ve converted the simple rule into an excel spreadsheet that allows you to specify a number of sections of a journey as defined by average speed (in mph) and duration (in mins). Basically it just works out the total range at the specified speed and then the % of that total range you would be using based on the time you specify (and so, therefore, the distance). It then just sums the %’s.

The link to the spreadsheet is here:
http://cl.ly/07413H1t1F20

No idea how long the link is valid for!

The core of the spreadsheet is the calculation that converts speed in mph and duration in mins into the % range used. It is a very messy equation because I just started with the separate components and then munged the entire thing together:

100/((1000/(1.6*[speed]))^2)*(([speed]*1.6)*([duration]/60))

I’m sure someone with a bit of time can tidy it up 🙂

Breaking the calculation down into parts it works as follows:

* Convert the speed to kph: 1.6*[speed]
* Apply the above rule to get the total range: (1000/(1.6*[speed]))^2
* Calculate the distance covered in km from the speed in kph and the time in h:([speed]*1.6)*([duration]/60)
* Calculate the % of the total range used by the distance travelled

I’ve included 3 rows in the spreadsheet representing my drive home from work – first a short time driving to the motorway, followed by the motorway followed by driving through south Birmingham.

What is interesting to note is how changing the 30mph sections in speed or time has very little impact on the overall range used in the journey (and, of course, you won’t actually manage 30mph in the city and neither is regen taken into account) but changing the motorway speed from 60mph to 70mph eats a massive 18% extra range.

I hope people find the spreadsheet useful! 🙂