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Cool new trip planning tool!

Kelly Carmichael has shared his electric vehicle (EV) trip planning tool on the British Columbia Nissan Leaf Owners group page – direct link to the tool here (looks like it has been taken down, at least for now…)

I made a quick tutorial video on how to use the tool.  I would recommend taking the information from his tool and putting it into a spreadsheet or writing it down on a piece of paper to bring with you on your road trips.  You could put the data into my trip planner spreadsheet and just hide the columns you don’t need to help organize your route and timing etc.

View the video in full screen for HD and easier viewing…

I forgot to mention in the video that if you want to look at the details of a charging location, click on the icon.  For more exact information, including up-to-date status of the station, visit PlugShare.  In Nelson, we do not yet have a public charger, so look up my home charger on PlugShare (make sure you have the ‘residential chargers’ selected) if you are visiting the area.

Colour Legend:

Blue = good to go!

Yellow = low battery warning

Red = very low battery warning

Black = can only do the trip in the downhill direction

 

kootenay andrew
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3 thoughts on “Cool new trip planning tool!”

  1. another easter egg is to click on the vehicle in the top right corner, this will bring up all the vehicles with all the behind the scenes data of energy required for different speeds on level ground. and it shows the confidence level I have that the numbers are correct. if you have better numbers for some vehicles let me know.

    the value of this tool is to make sure people planning the infrastructure and people using the infrastructure have the same view of how well the infrastructure works for these vehicles.

    my view is that the infrastructure should not require a vehicle to arrive with any warning lights when driving directly between 2 stations at the posted speed.

    1. very cool! for the 2013-2015 Leaf, it seems like the values may all be shifted to the right by one “10km/h” segment – I noticed it by looking at the 2011/2012 Leaf values for km/kWh; in my 2014, I get closer to 7 km/kWh at 90 km/h, not ~8 km/kWh.

  2. if you are wondering why the tool uses the age of the vehicle but not the km on the vehicle, it was to keep the concept simple for the planners, and just use a good average fleet value, the age assumes 4% loss of capacity per year, as we get more detailed information for each vehicle we will make those adjustments, so if you know your capacity loss it is easy to figure out the “age” as Andrew has done.

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