What a title 😂. Anyway I took my motorcycle on a ~200 km one way trip to see if the Tesla superchargers in Tilburg would work. These are part of the pilot program where other brands are allowed to charge.
That didn’t work though. Despite having charged the Mercedes EQV there without issues. But that is not what this writing is about. I’ll probably get back to these superchargers later on, hopefully when it works.
This is about the ride there and back. To cover almost 400 km I had to use the highway and it took me 4 hours in riding and three 20 minute charges. These are all the conditions of that day:
Ambient temp 4-6 dC (mostly wind & clouds, some light rain, see above picture)
Battery temp never above 40 dC nor below 25 dC once riding/charging
Charge speed not below 20 kW, always started and set at 24 kW
~380 km total distance ride on highways
3x ~20 min charge stops at HPC stations
Cruise speed first & last ~100 km at 120 kph, other sections at 100 kph (=limits)
In summer my battery temp would have peaked on the first charge and that would have influenced the speed on every next charge. I know because I did this during the summer getting down from the usual 24 kW charge speed to a very disappointing 7 kW.
The only reason this didn’t happen on this ride is the ambient temperature. It was still above freezing but also below 10 degrees Celsius. Somewhere around 4 to 6 degrees Celsius all day. Not really fun to ride through. But great for the battery.
The starting temperature of 15 degrees is from my garage. Next winter we’ll probably increase that just to see if it helps with the consumption of our EQV also parked in there. It’s range really suffers from the very inefficient heating system.
During the first 100 km or 1 hour ride the temperature of the battery went up to just below 25 degrees. This is by riding at constant speed but also great as an operating temperature so no complaints at all.
Next jump in battery temperature to around 37 degrees is from charging at 24 kW for 20 minutes. As of 35 or 36 degrees the speed drops but nothing too concerning. I think I still ended at 20 kW speeds.
The first drop in temperature is from riding to the next charger, again around 1 hour and 100 km. This is also where we see the biggest difference with the summer rides. In summer I would typically see 2 to 4 degrees at max per hour of riding. Here it was almost a 10 degree drop back to 28.
Charging again at the next stop for what was going to be 27 minutes at 24kW back to 80% coming from 20% turned out slightly longer up to 85% because someone asked me about my “Zero” 😆. Because I didn’t pay attention I charged too long resulting in reaching 40 degrees. literally 1 degree away from the yellow battery icon.
Probably the best news of this test ride is that the battery temperature dropped again while riding back to the first charger of the day. There is a strange horizontal section in that downward movement that I can’t really explain. I’m crossing borders there so maybe just lost connection for a while. I would have to look into the data logs. This graph is based on what was successfully pushed to server.
Anyway I charged up here nicely within limits of battery temperature and rode back home. Conclusion; ambient temperature does make a big difference. I’m not planning on doing much of this cold weather riding so I still hope Energica is working on active battery cooling. If so I suspect my SS9 to be for sale.
Big thanks to the creator of https://ev-monitor.com/ for making this kind of data collection so easy to view back 😍. These two graphs are from the same day showing SOC and Temp and even the route (including some of the day before).
