Tuesday, July 5, 2016

June 2016 Drive Report; Gas Tax Goes Up, EV Registration Fees Go Up, Commuting Time Goes Up

As mentioned several times, my lease mileage is not going to survive til the end of my lease (Dec 2016) so I made the painful decision to gas it a bit more this month... a BIG bit more.

The Corolla drove 1108.2 miles at a cost of $67.81 or 6.1 cents per mile.  It gathered no other expenses other than few top offs of the oil here and there.  My previous long term plan was to drive the Corolla until it needed tires then dump it but the additional load its taking on might force my hand on the tire thing. Sucks...

The LEAF went 1248.9 miles costing $30.09 or 2.4 cents per mile. This includes $8.10 in public charging fees as my free settlement juicing has sadly expired. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted and it was nice to see how the other 90% lives (me being one of the very very few to have driven two new LEAFs without NCTC...) At just under 39,000 miles, I have 6,000 lease miles and just under 6 months to go... *sigh*

Anyway, enough of this; on to life!!  Its July and its supposed to be getting hotter (week long forecast for the mid to upper 60's here) eventually so the concern here is fast charging during the heat of Summer.  Now, I haven't had a lot of chances to test this since my charging times tend to be as far from the heat of the day as one can get when a lot of them happening before 6 AM but did have one this week.

On Monday after a very long day, we had to stop and charge at the Blink in Fife with temps hovering in the mid 80's all day.  I started the charge and the battery temp (have to think its an anomaly) jumped from 77 to 89º within 20 seconds (LEAF Spy had only been running a few seconds before the charge started)  I charged for 24 mins gathering 12.48 kwh. Temps started at 89/90/90.1, finished at  97/98.6/96.6. Took off and continued upwards to 99.6/100.6/96.4.  This heat up after charging was complete did happen in stop and go traffic with ambients in the upper 70's (it was 8:24 PM) and only lasted a few minutes, roughly 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

Now the ambient pack temps being in the high 80's is very believable as we had been crawling along I-5 with the pavement probably very close to 90º even at that late hour (Sun was still up)

In other news; this month signals the cost of driving going up.  The WA State gas tax goes up 4.9 cents per gallon moving us to 2nd place in that race.  The EV registration tax goes up to $150.  The extra $50 will be partly used to fund a pilot program encouraging private businesses to host charging stations in the form of grants and favorable pricing.  The fund will be capped at one million dollars and before you ask; no, the fee will not drop back down to its previous $100 level when the money has been collected. As far as the gas tax hike; it apparently isn't enough. My local gas stop's prices did not budge an inch after the increase.

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