When people ask me what is the range of my electric truck, I tell them 40-50 miles. Now that is an estimate based on how many Ah per mile I use and 80% of capacity of my battery pack. I consider the full use to be 80%, always keeping 20% in reserve. The 20% reserve serves two purposes. First it give me additional "emergency" range in case I get in some situation where I have to drive more than planned, and secondly, it extends the life of the battery pack to avoid fully discharging it routinely.
Up to now, I have never actually measured the range, only estimated it. Short answer is 60 miles. Click below to read the details:
A couple of weekends ago, I needed to haul my tandem bicycle from my house in Austin out to Cedar Park for a ride (Atlas ride). The tandem is too big to take in a car, I need to put it in the back of my truck. Google maps tells me that the one-way distance is about 22 miles. So that means if I do the round trip, I will need to drive 44 miles on one charge (I considered trying to charge somehow in Cedar Park but that was not practical). Previously, the most miles on a single charge has been about 32 miles.
I was a little nervous about this idea just because I had never pushed it that far, and I really didn't know what happens as the battery pack runs low. But I decided to go ahead because I need to know.
Then end of that story is that it ended up being about 45 miles round trip, and my gauge showed 27% remaining (43 Ah). So that was no problem and gives me confidence in the 40-50 mile range estimate I have been using.
Now that I had drained it that far, I decided that I wanted to run it down, both to see what happens, and to see just how far it really goes. So I drove it around my hilly neighborhood until the remaining capacity showed 0. At no time did I hit a low-voltage alarm. I was pushing it up the hills to put a good load on the battery to see if the alarm would go off. Since my battery state-of-charge meter does not go below 0 Ah remaining I decided to stop at that point since I had no way to know how much more I was using. When I got home I had gone 62 miles.
My conclusion from this is that the Thundersky batteries I am using have a capacity of more than the rated 160 Ah and that they are able to deliver full power for at least that much capacity. I think I will repeat this test once per year so that I can see when they start to degrade below 160 Ah capacity. Hopefully that will be many years.
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