Tanbam

I think the 2017’s got more mileage due to more efficient motors and such, but I’m going on memory. 2019 introduced batteries with more energy capacity. I’ve seen rebuilt batteries somewhere that have better cells, but you’ve got to compare the cost of replacing it vs living with lower range until the battery is completely toast. Even a battery that has lost 50% of its capacity is still going to give you pretty good mileage overall. Personally, I’ll run my battery into the ground, assuming that I have my car that long. I’m less concerned with being carbon free than I am with saving money.

OBDLink It’s a more expensive solution, around $80 for the reader, but the app is really nice. It has the extended PIDs for many cars that you can download and install, so you can get a lot more information much more quickly than other apps. The reader also automatically connects to the other CAN bus on the OBD port which lets you communicate with the whole network. I paid the extra money because I have gone through around 5 other cheap readers, and this one is the only one that is consistently reliable. When I’m making changes inside the modules with ForSCAN, I want to be assured that I won’t drop the connection midway through.

The 2019 has 8.5kWH available when fully charged, and switches over to hybrid mode when there is 1.7kWH left, so there are 6.8kWH available for EV operation. I pull about 8kWH from a ChargePoint 220V charger, and around 9kWH from my 110 at home to charge an empty battery, more or less. You can’t really rely on the trip meter’s KW usage numbers, because the KW used value decreases when you regenerate. I’ve had plenty of trips where it reads as low as 4kW used and 40 EV miles. It would only be fairly accurate if you empty the battery on a level road with no braking. I don’t value that reading at all, and just go by EV miles. The best way to check your battery, in my opinion, is to get an OBDII reader and get the values from the car.

My commute is 50 miles each way, almost all of it highway at >50mph. I still get outstanding battery range, because just maintaining speed doesn’t seem too much of a power draw. I’ve gotten better than 40 EV miles during the 50 miles home on days where the conditions are optimal. My personal goal during the commute is to have the battery empty right when I get to my destination while minimizing my ICE use, but sometimes I end up with a few miles left on battery when I pull in. I blame overzealous EV Now use on my part. If I took myself out of the equation and get the car to switch modes automatically, it would probably work out better!

I was a bit afraid of that. I have a bit of experience hacking cars, so I think I might have an idea, though it will take some research. I already have most of the hardware. If I sniff the CAN traffic, I could probably monitor the power load, since it’s displayed on the dashboard. Hopefully (likely) the EV button sends CAN commands to the BCM. If this is the case, I could make a dongle to plug into the ODB port that measures the power consumption and switches EV modes at whatever thresholds I set. Maybe I’ll make this a summer project. If it works, I’ll share the details here.

This is a long shot, but I’ll start looking here first. I’ve got a long daily commute, 50 miles each way. The first and last 10 mike stretches are very hilly, with the middle portion being a bit flatter. All of it is highway. I charge at home and at work, so I have a full battery each leg. When I got the car (2019 with 9k miles) two months ago, I was just turning it on and drove it like a regular car. I was getting pretty good mileage. The car was predicting 20 EV miles with a full charge, and I was getting around 80mpg. Since then, I’ve started to try to maximize my economy, and I’ve gotten to where I’m getting better economy. On days when it’s not 30 degrees outside, I’m getting around 110mpg going to work and around 150mpg on the way home. No complaints there, for sure. My predicted EV range has been as high as 45 miles with a full charge, so I assume that I’m driving the car the “right” way now. My issue is that to get this performance, I’m constantly toggling between Auto and EV Later modes based on the road. I’m pretty much using the battery to maintain speed, not for climbing hills or acceleration. It was fun to do at first, but it’s starting to be tedious. I could give up and just drive it like normal, but I don’t want to spend the extra money in gas now. I think the car would get the best mileage for my situation if it could just use the EV Later mode power thresholds without saving any battery for later. Does anyone know if this is possible? Some setting that can be changed in one of the modules? I’ve already made some changes to add features with FORScan, but I don’t know if anyone has monkeyed with power thresholds yet.

Either replace it, or don’t. The car will run without a working catalytic converter, but the car will likely be emitting more pollution than it should.

For what it’s worth, my car gets “jerky” right when I start my commute, too. I’ve got a downhill slope when I leave my house, and the chargers at work are on an upper floor in a parking garage. I’m usually in L mode. When the battery is fully charged and it’s trying to regen right away, the car prevents the regen from charging the battery any more. It will either enable the ICE for deceleration, or open the regen circuit. Either way, the car jerks a little and drives funny until the battery is depleted enough for “normal” operation. Since I understand why the car acts like this, and it only happens under a very specific set of circumstances, I don’t have a problem with it. Don’t take the car in for repair for this, since it’s working like it’s supposed to. A “fix” for this could be to only charge the battery to 95% or so in the software when plugged in, but I’d rather they not do this.

I’ve been driving my 2019 Energi for a few weeks now, and have been picking up a lot of info from these forums - though there’s a lot less traffic on these boards than the ones for other vehicles that I also frequent. I bought a home that changed my commute to 50 miles each way, up from 29. My muscle car wasn’t making this easy on my wallet, so I bought an Energi. I’ve spent some time driving a Tesla, and when I got this car, I was hoping that the regen was more aggressive when I lifted my foot off of the accelerator. The L mode provides that kind of regen. The first week that I drove the Energi to work, I didn’t know about the L trick. I was averaging 60mpg driving each leg with a full battery. Once I started using L all of the time, it went up to 80mpg - an increase of 33%. Now I’ve been learning new tricks with accelerating using the ICE and cruising with the battery, and it’s up even higher, but I haven’t filled the tank up to get the final numbers yet. I know that the trip values are off, since the last tank’s trip said 103mpg average, but the pump and calculator said 123mpg. My average since reset at the last fill up says 112mpg now, and I’ve gone over 500 miles and have used less than half a tank of gas this week. I was spending $300/mo in my old car, which required premium gas. I had to fill up the tank every three days. My commute has a lot of hills. L mode grabs a LOT of that energy back. I try to fully deplete the battery on each leg. It’s hard to do, since there is a long downhill right before I pull into the office. I’m usually on an empty battery about two miles from work and running in hybrid mode, but with the L turned on, I can get back about 4% of the EV portion back by the time I pull up to the free charger at work. That doesn’t happen in normal D mode. It’s charging the battery HARD in L going down a hill. I see that there is about 100A going to the battery going down that hill. I’m sure that it isn’t great for the battery, but I don’t know if I’ll still have this car before the battery is toast, so I’m not really concerned at this point.