Third Drive of 120V System

Well, I don't know why we put it off more than a week, but we finally gave the new & improved 120V Civic a 3rd test drive. Mostly I guess I was afraid something else would go wrong.

But finally, tonight Alisa and I drove a closed 1.7 mile course starting from our house, three times around for a grand total of 5.1 miles, with an elevation change of about 140 feet from the lowest point on the route to the highest. That's 420 feet of rise & 420 feet of fall in 5.1 miles, or an average slope of 3.1%. Of course, most of the uphill occurs in about 0.5 mile of the course, and the rest of the course is level or downhill (it's a closed course!), so actually it is more like an average of 5.3% incline over 1.5 miles and 2.2% decline over the remaining 3.6 miles.

The KDH14500B did pretty well, IMO. Yes, it is dog-slow off the line, but if you have it in first gear and really step into it, it does alright. Not as good as a golf cart off the line, but then it gets up to 20-ish in first gear pretty easily, and subsequently up to 35 mph in 2nd quite easily. Haven't taken it over 40 mph yet.

But coming up the steepest part of the hill, which is from the low point on the course up the one block to our driveway, we couldn't keep it in 2nd gear. The old 72V controller would hold about 18 mph in 2nd gear. But the 14500B really wants you to shift down into first, and then it will also hold about 18 mph up the hill. Now, we did add 300 pounds of batteries and chargers that weren't there before, and it is still a 500A controller. Probably if we'd added 300 pounds into the Civic with the 72V controller, it would have had more problem with the hill then, too.

Afterwards I went around and felt the connections and battery temps and etc., and measured voltages, and everything seemed pretty copacetic. The controller and the motor were both very warm, enough that if they were any warmer at all I would have said they were hot. The starting voltage while still on float charge was 133.0V, and the ending voltage was 127.1V at rest before plugging back in. The six (92Ah) C&D Tech batteries were between 12.60 and 12.65 at the end of the drive, and the four (115Ah) Discover batteries were between 12.90 and 12.94.

And that's my report on drive #3.