FUV Owner Experiences

[thomriddle]

PAX, does your FUV have the standard battery pack or the extended range battery pack? Your posts are very much appreciated and I look forward to hearing about your range experience.

[Tightapex]

As others have said, great synopsis, PAX.  I intend to use the FUV primarily for commuting to work with the occasional weekend excursions with my wife.  For the open-air driving, I'll probably employ my earplugs as I do with my convertible.  I LOVE wind but the whipping can get much at times.  Earplugs are a great compromise.  As for highway cruising, I'm not convinced I'll sit at 80mph for long.  I know traffic can usually average that, but 65mph would work fine.  That's what other lanes are for... for people to go around.  And don't worry, I won't be camped in the left lane!

[PAX]

The battery is a 19.3 KWH battery. It fills the whole battery box. Just as a note there is a 12V battery in the box also. Right now Arcimoto is being,  in my opinion, conservative on battery parameters-  limiting high end and low end..  There is a battery percentage of charge gauge, actually a bar graph with the percentage below it.You can see it in picture at 72%.   This gauge has 100% at the top setting for the battery and 0 at the bottom setting so it shows usable battery percentage. The lowest we got to on our trip was 10% after 51.4 miles Some stop and go and rest around 50-53. we charged at a free Charge point station and charge point says we used 11 KWH of AC power to bring the battery up to 99%.That was the most we put in during the whole trip.  Chargepoint just rounds up/down their KWH readings and do to a silly snafu I ended up doing 3 charges to get the juice and each was rounded so I am not absolutely sure about the total KWH value. But it does fall into the range of our over all average.

My data on our trip and this is my data and subject to some error as referred to above.  We drove 470.7 Miles and used 106.82 KWH of AC to charge for these miles. That gives an average of 4.4Miles per KWH.  We traveled on both back roads (pic of Susan driving on back road) where we could work towards optimum energy usage and on  faster speed roads, often 55 speed limit with one lane in each direction, occasional passing lanes and shoulders to pull off on but a lot of time needing to keep up with traffic. Sometimes these roads would  have major curves at slower speed, even 30,  and always had uphills and downhills. It was fun driving and at times I was doing 55. and Red performed flawlessly. My point being that at times we were pushing fairly hard. I do think doors will help the mileage. Also we had two people and some luggage.  We had no problem finding places to charge,often hotel/ motels and two public parking stations with free charging. We did not pay anything for electricity except when we stopped at a home owners J1772 set up. He didn't want any money but we left him a $5 anyway.

[jetpad]

The battery is a 19.3 KWH battery. It fills the whole battery box. Just as a note there is a 12V battery in the box also. Right now Arcimoto is being,  in my opinion, conservative on battery parameters-  limiting high end and low end..  There is a battery percentage of charge gauge, actually a bar graph with the percentage below it.You can see it in picture at 72%.   This gauge has 100% at the top setting for the battery and 0 at the bottom setting so it shows usable battery percentage. The lowest we got to on our trip was 10% after 51.4 miles Some stop and go and rest around 50-53. we charged at a free Charge point station and charge point says we used 11 KWH of AC power to bring the battery up to 99%.That was the most we put in during the whole trip.  Chargepoint just rounds up/down their KWH readings and do to a silly snafu I ended up doing 3 charges to get the juice and each was rounded so I am not absolutely sure about the total KWH value. But it does fall into the range of our over all average.

My data on our trip and this is my data and subject to some error as referred to above.  We drove 470.7 Miles and used 106.82 KWH of AC to charge for these miles. That gives an average of 4.4Miles per KWH.  We traveled on both back roads (pic of Susan driving on back road) where we could work towards optimum energy usage and on  faster speed roads, often 55 speed limit with one lane in each direction, occasional passing lanes and shoulders to pull off on but a lot of time needing to keep up with traffic. Sometimes these roads would  have major curves at slower speed, even 30,  and always had uphills and downhills. It was fun driving and at times I was doing 55. and Red performed flawlessly. My point being that at times we were pushing fairly hard. I do think doors will help the mileage. Also we had two people and some luggage.  We had no problem finding places to charge,often hotel/ motels and two public parking stations with free charging. We did not pay anything for electricity except when we stopped at a home owners J1772 set up. He didn't want any money but we left him a $5 anyway.

When you are using the (regenerative) brakes, does it give you any indication of how much power it is putting back in the battery? Could you tell when going down long hills that you were not using much power (or were gaining power)?

[PAX]

When you are using the (regenerative) brakes, does it give you any indication of how much power it is putting back in the battery? Could you tell when going down long hills that you were not using much power (or were gaining power)?

There are two bar graphs below the speed indicator. There is a horizontal line with charge on the left and power on the right.  If you look close you can see a vertical white hash line below the big 4  and 3 green vertical hashes. The whitehash is fixed and the green lines vary in number either on the power side or charge side. In picture it is on power side with not a lot of power being used. When regenning the bars are on the left side and the number increases as you brake harder.  Both regen and power are pretty much just relative indicators. The number probably indicates something but hard to count while driving. There are two other vertical hash lines that do move. They indicate the maximum power or regen that you can use. You can see the charging one way over by the left side by CHG . the power one is way to the right. When the battery gets low the power one moves towards the middle and when the battery is charged the charge one moves towards the middle. Your power and charging are limited to these lines.

Going down hills-   3 scenarios --   one you want to speed up slowly (hill dependent) so you just coast   two- You want to speed up a bit faster so you can use a small amount of power  three - you are up to the speed you want and don't want to go any faster or have to slow then you regen.
Hard to tell how much power you are putting back into battery but it is usually for a relative short time so it is not a whole lot.   At times I would speed up a bit going down hill so I had speed up for the next uphill.  Way too often it seemed that there was a tight curve on the down hill runs and then a long uphill after.

[Kepesk]

Good info. Sounds like they still have some work to do to improve efficiency, but like you said, you're part of that process. It's so awesome to see these t Hi vs being used in the real world. Production, here we come!

[pedernorby@gmail.com]

I suspect aero drag is the chief thief of range and that a full door set, soft or hard will increase "mpkw" pretty dramatically :
Awesome reports.
Here is so-cal, we may leave the doors off as a norm but on longer range trips put them on to lower aero drag.
As a former BMW Mini-E and BMW ActiveE prototype driver, aero is king as far as range goes.

[PAX]

I suspect aero drag is the chief thief of range and that a full door set, soft or hard will increase "mpkw" pretty dramatically :
Awesome reports.
Here is so-cal, we may leave the doors off as a norm but on longer range trips put them on to lower aero drag.
As a former BMW Mini-E and BMW ActiveE prototype driver, aero is king as far as range goes.

I am sure you are correct. The passenger gets a fair amount of wind on them, not direct in your face but more an eddying type wind. The type that creates drag like on a sailboat when stalling the sail. In stop and go and uphill driving  total weight also plays a factor. 
There was a post on calculated miles per gallons(Edit- KWH) a while back. I can't find it at the moment but if I remember correctly it was close to accurate and did have something on no doors and with doors.

[gregbinahurry]

Has anyone heard anything reported by Nathan Fillion since he took delivery? I follow him on Twitter and have seen nothing. Seems strange that he got his " spaceship " and then no other comments.

[Kepesk]

Has anyone heard anything reported by Nathan Fillion since he took delivery?  I follow him on Twitter and have seen nothing.  Seems strange that he got his " spaceship " and then no other comments.

His daughter posted an Instagram video where he said he liked it... that's the only thing I've seen.