Has anybody tried Mountain Mode (MM) while State of Charge (SOC) of battery is high (over 45%) in EV mode?
It is known that if you shift to MM in Charge Sustain (CS) mode engine would top the battery up to 45% SOC as well as providing enough power for current driving power demand.]
STUDY OF FORCED MOUNTAIN MODE VS NORMAL MODE
I have a route I take often that is right at 100 miles, with several steep uphill and downhill grades. The results of hypermiling and select use of MM is suprising and shows that GM has done about as good a job as possible to achieve best efficiencies.
Trip 1: 100.1 miles 58.1 CD miles 42 CS miles 1.59 gallons 12.92 KWHR Cost(gas + Elec) $10.594
Trip 2 : 98 Miles 43 CD miles 55 CS miles 1.55 gallons 13.22 KWHR $10.50
Trip 3: 99.4 miles 61 CD miles 38.4 CS miles 1.59 gallons 12.89 KWHR $10.575
The difference in trip lengths is the selection of the restaurant
So I conclude that at the current price of gas and electricity here any trade off between runing entirely in Normal vs trying to use MM to improve effeciency is at best a push. So I guess I will run in Normal for these trips.
Which tells you how hard people thrash the Volt during demosHe said it will save about 5 miles of charge to allow the public to experience the car in CD.
The most cost efficient use of MM I have experienced is to use MM (during a SOC condition that will allow MM to force the ICE to run) when travelling uphill grades and Normal for all flat and downhill travelling. That seems to utilize the ICE to add the extra charge to the battery while at the same time assisting in driving the car. Not a big difference in cost per mile but the best I have achieved. On one 98 mile trip I got 64.2 mile CD and 33.8 CS miles(1.29 gallons of gas). Using MM on flat land driving adds to cost per mile.I have been using MM a bit more lately on longer outings, primarilly because I wanted to be in stealth mode during certain portions (like when driving up the driveway to my son's girlfriend's house... okay, ego matters).
A couple thoughts now have occured to me:
1) MM must be very powerful at battery charging. It takes minutes, not hours, to raise the battery SOC (amazing).
2) As long as I arrive home at the end of the outing with the battery fully depleted, I've succeeded (no wasted gas).
3) MM efficiency may be relatively high (no extra heat loss), so it's a zero-sum game (MM is okay for managing SOC).
I'd be happy to hear confirmations or contradictions.
Chris
Not exactly. When running in MM with 3 miles left the ICE was running very hard to recharge your SOC to about 13 miles. ie. lot harder than it needed to just to propel the car...thus used more gas than needed to.<snip> so in reality I got 6 "free" miles on top of the 24 mpg
Cruising at 68 (on cruise control)a good little test, which seems to show that battery recharging in mountian mode is fairly efficent, however the numbers are small and rounded, which could introduce siginificent error.
how fast were you trvaling at during that 6 minutes?