TRAILER RANGE, not even close.

[daczone]

Took my RMAX out for a ride yesterday. (Maybe 3000 lbs). Range drops drastically.... I was getting 1.6 miles per KW with 70 mile range being shown. My girl says, wow that's it? To which I said it's not accurate at all. @ 1.6 x 90% would have been 185 miles. So she says you have to do the math? Yeah pretty much. This got me to thinking, Why can't Ford improve on this? Many lightning folks call it the guess-o-meter. My Tesla on the other hand is dead accurate. When it says I will have 150 miles left going through the mountain area to get the to beach from my house. It is right on.

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[Pioneer74]

Ford can't even get the efficiency readings the same on the center screen and instrument cluster.

Math is indeed hard.

 

[Heliian]

If you don't program a trailer I think it assumes worst case scenario. I just select "no active trailer".

 

[jdmackes]

It's supposed to improve with time as you drive the trailer, but who knows if it actually will. It's easy enough to do the math real quick but it would be nice if the range calculation was improved some.

 

[Maquis]

Did you enter the trailer parameters? If not, how can it possibly calculate it?

 

[Firn]

Did you enter the trailer parameters? If not, how can it possibly calculate it?

Range is just battery capacity by some rolling average of efficiency. If he was seeing 1.6mi/kwh then range is just simple math from there.

 

[daczone]

Did you enter the trailer parameters? If not, how can it possibly calculate it?

I did put in the numbers... I didn't put a sticker on it and go through the trailer pro learning however. I did this with my little trailer and OMG that was a chore. I pulled into a HUGE parking lot and I think I drove every inch of it.

I do love the find the hitch feature.

 

[VTbuckeye]

Ford can't even get the efficiency readings the same on the center screen and instrument cluster.

Math is indeed hard.

? The more we point this out, the more likely they will do away with at least one of them.

 

[VTbuckeye]

Took my RMAX out for a ride yesterday. (Maybe 3000 lbs). Range drops drastically.... I was getting 1.6 miles per KW with 70 mile range being shown. My girl says, wow that's it? To which I said it's not accurate at all. @ 1.6 x 90% would have been 185 miles. So she says you have to do the math? Yeah pretty much. This got me to thinking, Why can't Ford improve on this? Many lightning folks call it the guess-o-meter. My Tesla on the other hand is dead accurate. When it says I will have 150 miles left going through the mountain area to get the to beach from my house. It is right on.

The best thing about 1.6 miles per kWh is that with an ER battery you consume just over 2 miles per percent SOC. So if you have 75 percent remaining you should be able to go at least 150 miles.

My most recent towing experience averaged about 1.7 miles per kWh and using the 2 miles per percent gave me an easy estimate with a little bit of safety built in.

 

[climateguy]

Has anyone checked if the mi/kwh number is accurate? I've been meaning to use the odometer reading and the number of kwh I buy from the charger company to calculate and compare, but I haven't got around to it yet.

I just towed a 17' travel trailer that weighs a bit more than 3000 lbs for more than 3000 miles to Tucson and back to the Pacific Northwest. I usually kept my speed to 55 mph. I would take a look at the mi/kwh figure but I never felt I could rely on it. I would completely ignore the range calculation the truck would put out.

What I relied on was the distance to the next charger given by Google Maps on my laptop. Given a starting charge of 90%, I never attempted to drive more than 135 miles, and my usual was 120 miles.

I wouldn't have minded feeling that it would be possible to drive this truck towing this trailer 150 miles between charges, but I don't have that feeling yet. I think it is possible.

I don't feel that Ford deserves a lot of criticism though, even though it sure seems that way. They've got a lot of problems - they aren't selling as many Lightnings as they thought they might, and what Trump is doing to the rules of trade can't be easy to cope with.

One really great thing about towing a travel trailer with this truck is that the colossal size of the battery compared to the what the trailer A/C, microwave, electric heater, and instant pot require meant we could boondock with full electric power.

We came away from this 3000 mile trip feeling really good about our decision to commit to towing with an electric truck.

 

[MidAtlanticLightningClub]

I did put in the numbers...

Once you set up a trailer profile the truck will use this to improve the estimates. These get much better the more you haul that trailer while the profile is turned on.

 

[21st Century Truck]

...from another thread on the subject (the GOM):

As a wise older engineer once told me: "Electricity is not a liquid. You can measure water or gasoline or diesel or kerosene or coal almost exactly, by volume and by weight. Stored electricity can only be measured by its potential to do work".

When I switched to EV driving years later, I began to understand what that old engineer had shared with me.

Hence, the Guess-o-Meter on our EV vehicles. It tries to estimate the potential to do work by our vehicle-stored electricity. It's always an ever-changing estimate and not an actual measure of physical weight or volume. It's not wrong in what it tries to do... we users have to un-train ourselves from a lifetime habit of measuring fuel by physical attributes (gallons / liters / pounds etc.) and then our GOMs might become more useful to us.

Hope this is a useful way to look at our instrumented info.

 

[MidAtlanticLightningClub]

Took my RMAX out for a ride yesterday. (Maybe 3000 lbs). Range drops drastically.... I was getting 1.6 miles per KW with 70 mile range being shown. My girl says, wow that's it? To which I said it's not accurate at all. @ 1.6 x 90% would have been 185 miles. So she says you have to do the math? Yeah pretty much. This got me to thinking, Why can't Ford improve on this? Many lightning folks call it the guess-o-meter. My Tesla on the other hand is dead accurate. When it says I will have 150 miles left going through the mountain area to get the to beach from my house. It is right on.

One very important parameter hasn't been mentioned here: how fast were you going? The Connected Navigation system will assume you drive the speed limit. Speed is your single biggest range killer. A Lightning isn't very aerodynamic. That rig is far worse! Increases in speed above estimates is going to have a dramatic impact on range/efficiency.

Here are two figures from Ford:

The biggest impact of the trailer is aerodynamics.

Combine these two (the impact of speed on a trailer) and you get really large impacts of speed on trailers.

 

[21st Century Truck]

One very important parameter hasn't been mentioned here: how fast were you going? The Connected Navigation system will assume you drive the speed limit. Speed is your single biggest range killer. A Lightning isn't very aerodynamic. That rig is far worse! Increases in speed above estimates is going to have a dramatic impact on range/efficiency.

Here are two figures from Ford:

The biggest impact of the trailer is aerodynamics.

Combine these two (the impact of speed on a trailer) and you get really large impacts of speed on trailers.

...and. climbing (steep degree of grade) also affects things noticeably, with trailer and without trailer.

 

[SpaceEVDriver]

Has anyone checked if the mi/kwh number is accurate? I've been meaning to use the odometer reading and the number of kwh I buy from the charger company to calculate and compare, but I haven't got around to it yet.

In my experience the values are relatively accurate after more than a couple dozen miles. There is some loss due to inefficiencies when recharging (what the charger delivers is more than what the battery receives), so you’ll need to be careful to account for that when you double-check.

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