How much of the 20.1kWh is being used? Did they design it to be cautious and worry about the longevity or dipping into more in the future?
I'm a little confused when I see folks talk about switching over to the ICE before the battery runs out as if they are trying to manage the battery somehow.
The Chevrolet Volt has a 16kWh (16.5 in 2013s) battery but uses the middle ~65% (22%-87%) of it ... so about 10.3kWh (10.8kWh in 2013s).
On a post by Rusty using a DashDAQ he determined a finer breakdown of the Volt's battery capacity usage.
http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread.php?5328-Volt-Diagnostic-Tool&p=91868#post91868
I'm a little confused when I see folks talk about switching over to the ICE before the battery runs out as if they are trying to manage the battery somehow.
The Chevrolet Volt has a 16kWh (16.5 in 2013s) battery but uses the middle ~65% (22%-87%) of it ... so about 10.3kWh (10.8kWh in 2013s).
On a post by Rusty using a DashDAQ he determined a finer breakdown of the Volt's battery capacity usage.
http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread.php?5328-Volt-Diagnostic-Tool&p=91868#post91868
My first results that might be of interest from the DashDAQ OBD scanner, I eyeballed the transitions of each battery bar. The DashDAQ has at least two signals for battery level in the Volt extension driver, one for battery level % and one for the battery gauge %. The gauge turns out to map directly to the battery bars on the display, with each bar ticking off every 10% of the signal range (at least it did for the transactions I happened to watch - staring at the scanner while driving being a bad idea I haven't watched to confirm the entire series).
Here's how it maps between the gauge display and the actual battery SOC (or at least I think the VICM term is SOC).
The ICE comes on around 20% SOC, and the CS (Charge Sustaining) SOC is around 22%. So the ICE runs a bit to bring the SOC back up from 20%ish to 22%ish. This somewhat confirms some of what we've heard about the battery and battery SOC.Code:Battery Gauge Gauge % Actual 16kWh Battery % 10 bars 91%-100% 81%-86.5% 9 bars 81%-90% 74.4%-81% 8 bars 71%-80% 68%-74.4% 7 bars 61%-70% 61.5%-68% 6 bars 51%-60% 55.3%-61.5% 5 bars 41%-50% 48.7%-55.2% 4 bars 31%-40% 42.1%-48.7% 3 bars 21%-30% 35.6%-42.1% 2 bars 11%-20% 29.3%-35.5% 1 bar 1%-10% 22.7%-29.3% 0 bars 0%-1% 20%-22.7%[/SIZE][/FONT]