Some observations about ABRP (A Better Routeplanner) use in the Lightning

I took a ~5 hour trip yesterday up to the mountains in SW VA. I mostly used ABRP via Android Auto, and I had it pull the truck's battery info from the OBD2 port using an OBDLink CX adapter. It worked well enough, and in some cases better than I thought. Here are a few things about it:

• It apparently won't calculate a route if you're moving, at least at a good rate of speed. I was trying to get AA to open a 3rd app (Waze) so I could listen for road alerts, but apparently AA only allows two apps to run simultaneously. As a result, ABRP got closed, and when I opened it back up, it would not calculate the route. If you're quick, however, you can open it, hit the search button and have it search for your recent destination and then it'll calculate.
• It will update your route to charge at a different location if you're doing better/worse than expected. Temps were in the mid to upper 80s yesterday, but even though I was headed into higher elevations above 70mph, I was still beating ABRP's canned estimated efficiency and it told me I could save a bit of time if I stopped at a later charger. According to Plugshare, however, that charger doesn't work, so I stuck with my original stop.
• The navigation screen pretty much sucks. It's zoomed out way too far to really see much, BUT it does integrate with the instrument cluster display so you can see your upcoming turns that way. I found this to be "good enough" but not as good as Ford's navigation. You can't run both at the same time though.
• If you use an OBD2 dongle, it will calibrate to your vehicle. The "reference consumption" of a Lightning is 496wh/mi, but even going into the mountains it recalibrated to 390wh/mi. My overall consumption was higher than that - 1.9mi/kwh or 526wh/mi, but that's at higher speed and increasing elevation. I am curious to see how this calibration changes when I head home down the mountains, and if it changes again when the weather turns cold.

Overall it's nice to have ABRP as an option, but it's still a little clunky. I may use it a bit more to provide data to it to really dial in my efficiency for planning purposes, but the factory navigation works better in almost every other way as long as it's a familiar route. I just wish the Ford system would tell me my estimated percentage or miles at arrival, and I wish it accounted for elevation changes. When ABRP failed to calculate a route I went back to the Ford navigation and it said I didn't need to charge at all on this trip (in reality I needed around 35kwh to make it). It seemed to only track remaining miles with no respect to travel speed or elevation, so if you put too much trust in it you could find yourself searching for a charger. It seems to let you get down to 10 miles of range at your destination before it decides to insert a charging stop.

Yeah, I have never used ABRP for actual navigation. I just use it to plan routes and then use Google maps to nav from stop to stop. Seems to work much better.

For my first big road trip w/ my Ioniq 5; I used ABRP for a couple of smaller trips to get it to provide a better reference consumption w/ my OBD.

The default reference consumption for Ioniq5 is 3mi/kwh @ 65mph... My calculated consumption after using it for a couple hundred miles before my bigger road trip was 3.7 @ 65mph. The more data it has the better it'll predict. But, it was always within 5% in terms of arrival battery change after I started using it more.

But, yes, the navigation / routing interface within Andriod Auto for ABRP is clunky AF. Hope that you don't have to manually reroute with it while driving.

What I did was preplan everything prior to leaving on my Computer, and save the route and then pull it up in the App in the car prior to leaving. That includes stops outside of charging.

Then, when you get into "town" and don't really need it to calculate charging stops/battery, I would switch to Google Maps or Waze.

I wish I could use ABRP simply as a destination for the vehicle's efficiency data - collecting it in the background for a more accurate estimate when planning a trip, but not actually using it for navigation. The truck does not allow you to run both ABRP and the built in navigation at the same time, at least while using Android Auto. I guess I could use the built in navigation and not connect my phone to Android Auto so I could run them simultaneously, but I also use AA for Spotify. Then again, I wonder just how much more accurate the estimate will become with more data. 390wh/mi @ 65 is a stone's throw from @tommolog 's results when driving at 70mph which was ~454wh/mi. I guess I was just surprised at how much better the truck did compared to the default ABRP efficiency of 496wh/mi.

When I plan a trip in ABRP, I tell it what I think my consumption rate will be rather than rely on its default.

beatle said:

I guess I was just surprised at how much better the truck did compared to the default ABRP efficiency of 496wh/mi.

Click to expand...

Abrp defaults are always off, way too conservative. Need to input your own, or have it use data directly from car.

The current f150L efficiency is what they started with as everyone was expecting trucks to actually be worse than they turned out to be.

They've never revised the default despite lots of data from rivian and ford range tests.

Abrp should default to 2.2 mil/kWh at 65mph. Not 1.68. and those in cold climates likely need to be a bit more on top of changes. I'm not sure how abrp calculates cold. I'm in CA so I don't do cold weather driving that would notably impact range.

ABRP has many places to tweak things. Temp, weather, etc. And of course efficiency. And, while you are driving, if consumption is off, hitting + or - brings it in line.

On the trip back down out of the mountains I ran ABRP again and it raised my calibrated consumption to 419wh/mi. It was pretty darn accurate though, and was within 1% of its original estimate even when using 75% of the battery! They definitely have a good algorithm for estimating range based on speed, weather. They just needed a better starting point for consumption.

If you have used ABRP with an OBD connection, please post your calculated consumption!

beatle said:

On the trip back down out of the mountains I ran ABRP again and it raised my calibrated consumption to 419wh/mi. It was pretty darn accurate though, and was within 1% of its original estimate even when using 75% of the battery! They definitely have a good algorithm for estimating range based on speed, weather. They just needed a better starting point for consumption.

If you have used ABRP with an OBD connection, please post your calculated consumption!

Click to expand...

Tapping on the “Confidence Bars” reveals a pop up that details where the app is with the calibration of your vehicle….I obviously have some more driving to do…….

That's a good tip. I didn't know that icon was interactive. My calibration is:

Low - 65%
Medium: 85%
High: 90%