EV only Range after nearly 4 years... where you guys at?

But this forum is lucky to include the logical @Landshark to probe questionable assertions and bring the forum back to reality. Our @MrFixit is an awesome authority on how our favorite PHEV works.

Programming a GOM (Guess-O-Meter) without having any data about what's up ahead is very a difficult task, but PHEV/EV drivers expect their vehicles to provide range predictions, so there it is. I agree the SOC readout provides more useful information, but only for drivers willing to monitor it to develop a meaningful interpretation.

 

I will stick to my guns that the 'Guess-O-Meter' is actually very good IF your driving patterns are consistent from day to day (this is true for lots of people, maybe most people). If your driving patterns vary greatly, then you may perceive the GOM as a failure, but as @insightman says, it is just not possible to predict EV range accurately without knowledge about what the driver will be doing while using that energy. The root problem is the fact that actual EV range is subject to a lot of different conditions which can change substantially from drive to drive.

 

The point I tried to make is that I suspect that the legions of people reporting huge drops in the digital display of EV miles available are most likely being fooled by the guess-o-meter which grossly underestimates the true miles available as shown in the bar chart at the left of the display. I frequently drive 5-7 miles more when EV display shows "0.0" and even then the car is still running on EV.

 

I will have to disagree with your thinking. It is my observation that the EV range reaches zero when the SOC drops to 10%. It is just that simple. At this point, there are 2 bars on the battery bar chart. True, your battery is not dead, and it is possible to deplete it even further (even down to zero bars), but I would strongly discourage that. Honda designed in buffer regions at both low and high charge levels in order to optimize battery life (especially important since a PHEV will typically experience many more charge cycles than a BEV).

I have never experienced a condition where the EV range was 0, and the vehicle is still operating in EV mode. When the range hits 0, it switches to HV mode. HV mode does alternate between EV and ICE by it's nature, and it tries to maintain that 10% SOC while doing so. If you push it hard enough though, the ICE cannot keep up and the SOC will drop below 10%, but that is an undesirable condition and you should try to avoid it because it stresses the battery.

 

If your suspicion is correct, wouldn’t the condition you describe have existed from day one of ownership?

This thread originated with a question about EV range now, versus 4 years ago. For a discussion of EV range to have value, we would need to discuss actual range. As you noted, the EV range on the display is just an estimate based on previous drives. It will be reasonably accurate if the vehicle is driven in a similar fashion on a repeated basis. Some have given the EV range display a nonsensical nickname. Things like that happen on an open forum.

The battery gauge is just that. It’s like a fuel gauge for the battery. In 4 years of driving the Clarity the display has always shown 2 bars on the gauge at 0 EV miles. At that point the ICE always triggers when there is a call for power. I have driven for more than 100 miles, with 2 bars, through the mountains in N Cal on I-5. The gauge has never dropped below 2 bars, under any conditions, ever. My EV range is what I get from the top 18 bars on the battery gauge.

A peculiarity with this car, is that it allegedly behaves differently for different owners. Your car may be able to utilize the last 2 bars and remain in EV mode until they are depleted. Mine doesn’t, so I don’t have 5-7 more miles of EV range available after the estimate shows zero. But then, our car has never triggered the ICE when applying the brakes with a fully charged battery either.

Another necessity in the quest for meaningful data, is that owners would need to report current EV range compared to previous EV range, under the same driving conditions. Many owners understand that. Sometimes we hear about a decline in range and then it’s like pulling teeth to find out that the person reporting this is now driving 75mph rather than 50mph.

Nonsense does occur. We just have to filter it out.

 

Yes, we seem to have differences. My 2018 Clarity shows not "2" but several (ranging from about 4 to 5) horizontal bars when display is "0.0" and I have driven 7 miles while digital display says "zero". I think we both agree that the digital display can be way off. Currently, my digital shows about 40 ish but I can easily go 45 and still running on EV. When my digital shows about 15 the bars are halfway up. I suggest that four year old Clarity's where digital shows as low as 30 might still have range at 40 or above.

 

What you are experiencing is an anomaly. It may be the first such report on this forum. One could easily dismiss it as nonsense, however, with this car, we’ll take you for your word. If you ever have the opportunity to take a photo of the display with 4-5 bars and zero EV miles, we’d like to see it.

I do not agree that the digital display “can be way off”. My experience is that it is reasonably accurate when the vehicle is driven similarly to the way it was previously driven. An ICE vehicle can have the same degree of inaccuracy if driven differently. Mine is extremely accurate at zero miles.

It might, if driven differently. Only a car that has the same anomaly as yours would behave like yours.

 

I think maybe my observations are a bit mixed up. I have to admit I have not been extremely careful in recording what I did and saw. The one thing I can assert without any doubt whatsoever is that regardless of the initial reading when I fully charge, which might be 38 or 41 or whatever, when I drive and get down to digital display = 0.0, I have on a few occasions inadvertently continued to drive several miles with digital display = 0.0 before I realized it. How many miles did I drive with digital display = 0? I am not sure. I made a rough guess of 5 to 7 miles for those occasions. If you are saying each bar is 2.5 miles and two bars = 5 miles, that might suggest that after the digital display goes to zero, there is still five miles EV left as represented by two bars? I did not notice after driving several miles on "0" if the two bars dropped to one bar or none.

 

Perhaps some carful observation on your part and a follow up report could benefit the discussion.

The car will continue to drive with zero EV miles on the display until the fuel supply is exhausted. Are you certain the engine never ran after you reached zero EV miles?

Each bar represents a certain amount of stored energy, let’s say .75kWh’s. The distance that amount of energy will propel the vehicle will vary with driving conditions. I’ve depleted the battery in as little as 25 miles, in warm weather by driving at freeway speeds and going up hill. I’ve also managed to drive 65+ miles by driving in rush hour traffic. To be clear, I would not say that “each bar is 2.5 miles”.

Additionally, while I have read on this forum that some owners have depleted one or both of the last 2 bars on the battery gauge, my experience is that the energy represented by those 2 bars is not available for my use. Likewise, some owners have reported that the battery gauge will steadily drop while they are on a long drive in HV mode. This is another behavior that has never occurred with our Clarity.

 

I have come to realize that everything I said is either suspect or simply wrong. The above mentioned users appear to be much closer to the truth. When I continued to drive for miles while the digital display read "0.0" I didn't check to see if the gasoline engine went on.
The GOM has to guess how many miles electric remain based on a previous mix of EV and HV, and since in my case most of the time there are more miles HV than EV, it is not clear how the GOM compounds the data to arrive at a digital estimate of EV miles. In a few cases where I did less freeway driving (mainly city driving on EV) the GOM rose significantly. The GOM does not measure the state of charge, but rather the expected miles based on past driving patterns. Exactly what the bar chart at the left of the display reads remains uncertain. Is it a graphical version fo the digital display, or something else?

 

The bar chart/battery gauge represents the battery SOC. Pure and simple. We can debate endlessly whether or not it represents 0-100%, 10-90%, 10-100% or some other figures, but that doesn’t change its function.

The EV range estimate is initially based on previous driving habits. How that is calculated is really no concern of mine. It’s one of those things that none of us can control, and for me, it isn’t worth the effort to try to understand. It does, however, adjust on the fly. As an example, when we leave our house it is mostly downhill for 4-5 miles. If we start with an estimate of 45 miles, there is almost always 45 miles remaining after driving for those first 4-5 miles. On the return, the opposite occurs. We’ll burn 8-10 of the miles from the estimate while driving up those 4-5 miles. It all averages out.

As deep as I want to go on the topic of the EV range estimate, is that it averages the amount of energy used to travel a certain distance to calculate the estimate.