LEAFing the Pump Behind

Well, not really. I was stranded, but I did it on purpose. I wanted to see what happens when you run out the battery in the LEAF, so I purposely ran it out. Here’s how it happened.

I started at my office with a full charge and drove the LEAF home. I didn’t charge overnight and the next day, I drove to and from work without charging. When I got home, I was down to 4 miles of range left. I think I was told at some point that you’d get your first low battery warning when you were down to 20% battery capacity, but that wasn’t the case. My first low battery warning came when I had only 7 miles of range left – definitely less than 20%! I was surprised the car lets you get that low before warning you. I was also told that when you get this first warning, the car will start turning systems like the radio and climate control off to conserve battery. This was also not the case – radio and climate control were both still on. The first warning was visual only. A yellow charging indicator appeared on the dash display, along with a message on both the dash display and the touch screen display warning me that the battery level is very low. The touch screen message asked if it could direct me to the nearest charging station, which I ignored.

No, I do not want to search for a charging station.

Headed for trouble...

So there I was with about four miles of range left. I didn’t want to get too far from home so I’d be close to my charging station (aka the outlet in my garage), so I started circling my neighborhood. The range went to 3 miles, I kept driving, and then the range went to a blinking “—“.

At this point, I got another warning. This one was visual and audible. A voice announced that I had very low battery charge. The touch screen display again asked to direct me to the nearest charging station. Radio and climate control were both still going.

It's getting serious now...

So now the car is giving me no indication of how much farther I can go. However, the manual says that when you’re very close to out of charge, you’ll enter  “turtle mode”. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate I was in turtle mode yet, so I kept driving. I drove at least 3 more miles with my range estimate at “—“ before I finally entered turtle mode. And yes, an actual picture of a turtle appears on the dash display when you’re in turtle mode.

There's the turtle!

So now I’m in turtle mode. Time to stop driving? Of course not! I went up and down my street a few times to see if I could tell a difference in how the LEAF performs in this mode. The only difference I could see is that turtle mode limits the electric motor output. You don’t even really notice that unless you floor it (which I did). If you’re watching the energy readout display, you’ll notice that the electric motor output tops out in turtle mode at around 30-35 kW. But otherwise, the car drives pretty much normally. And the radio and climate control were both still on. At this point I wanted to make sure I was very close to home, so I turned into my driveway to run the rest of this experiment from there.

I went up and down the driveway a few times and started getting impatient, so I turned up the heat and turned on the windshield wipers to see if that would move things along. Finally, I got an audible warning that the vehicle power is limited. At this time, the windshield wipers slowed and the heat turned off. The fan was still running, but the energy meter was not showing any climate control power usage. It just so happened that I was at the top of my driveway at this time, so I tried to shift into reverse to see if I could still move. I couldn’t. The LEAF would only allow me to shift into neutral. So that was it. Out of charge – kind of. The radio and headlights were still on, and I could raise and lower the windows. So it looks to me like dead battery in the LEAF isn’t quite completely dead. You can’t move any more, but systems that might be handy to have (like your headlights and hazards lights) still function. It could be that these are running off the 12V battery and not the lithium-ion batteries, but in either case, they work.

And, incidentally, when I checked my trip odometer I had gone 73 miles on my full charge.

So that’s it, folks. My 12 weeks with Advanced Energy’s LEAF are over. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it. It’s been fun to see firsthand what it’s like to drive an electric vehicle. Overall, I’d say that it’s not that much different than driving a gasoline vehicle and I really loved not having to buy gas! Thanks to Advanced Energy for allowing me to “LEAF the pump behind!”