Harvester Battery Stage of Charge Question

[SpaceEVDriver]

This makes me wonder if all you guys think the Traveler will be better MPG or if the Terra will? Excluding how a person drives it. Lead foot or Grandpa every day.

Given the front surface area, my guess is they’ll be similarly (in)efficient. The relative length difference won’t matter very much. The relative weight won’t make much difference either.

 

[speedrye]

Given the front surface area, my guess is they’ll be similarly (in)efficient. The relative length difference won’t matter very much. The relative weight won’t make much difference either.

I can see the aerodynamics of the truck bed being the biggest factor. Curious to see the end results.

 

[Cranky Canuck]

It was several years ago when I read Station 11 (book is more fun to read than the HBO series IMO) and learned that gasoline eventually... "dies" / "goes stale". While I do want the harvester for days when I go skiing in the mountains or down to Oregon or California for wine tasting, I don't know how many days there are when I travel 150+ miles. +1 on the idea that the software would be able to alert you to when you might have a 'stale gas' problem.

I used to own a plug-in hybrid and there's already a simple solution for the stale fuel problem.

What Chrysler did was simply run the engine for a set period of time/kms after the oil got up to a certain temperature. It was called the "fuel and oil refresh mode" and it was a cycle that would run after about six months if the fuel wasn't used. It would run the engine until it basically burned through all the gas no matter how you drove. It was a bit more nuanced than that but essentially it would sense how old the fuel in the tank was and it could also sense how much water and gunk was in the oil and it would try and burn that stuff off after a certain amount of time. On of the problems with vehicles like PHEVs is that the engines don't often get all the way up to operating temperature for long enough periods to burn off the combustion byproducts that tend to get absorbed by the oil. In a normal combustion vehicle or mild hybrid those byproducts build up but then get burned off almost immediately once everything is up to temp. In a PHEV and possibly an EREV the engine tends to only come on in spurts so things don't have a chance to burn off so they build up over time.

As an owner it sucked because it meant you were forced to buy gas even though you stayed entirely in EV mode and basically never used the gas engine. It also meant you have to be diligent about replacing the oil because it would get acidic and eat the seals. This nuisance was one of the many reasons we decided to get rid of the PHEV and go full BEV.