This wasn’t really supposed to be a range testing day, but it ended up that way.
The shop and my job are both pretty close, and between the two and my house there is one very big hill. It even takes a little bit out of my Jetta when I go up it each day. So Sunday was the day we were testing the car’s ability to make it up this big hill going into town.

We had a good charge on it from the night before. We set out late afternoon for our ride into town. All was going great when we got to the hill – and it kept going great. I won’t lie, the car did slow down from 50mph at the bottom of the hill, to about 35mph at the top of the hill – but as soon as I got over the top it quickly went back up to ~50mph. It didn’t’ suck down too many amps going up the hill either, the gauge was stuck right at about 250 amps on the way up. Again, I was pretty happy with this.

We made it back to the shop without any problem. I checked the batteries when we got there and they were pretty much empty. After settling for a little bit they did level out to about 75 volts. Now I was faced with a bit of a dilemma – I needed to get the car home so I could take it work Monday, but 75 volts was definitely cutting it close. I could have left the car at the shop to charge for a few hours, but I would have had to come back after dinner and use more gas in the regular car to go back and forth. I decided to go for it and take it home then. Luckily, I had my brothers buy in to help me push it to the nearest outlet if it couldn’t make it.

We started out on the voyage home. Everything went perfect for the first 4-5 miles. Then I started loosing power. Again I lucked out and the car lost power when the speed limit changed from 55 to 45 so I was still doing the speed limit. We got to my town without much problem, however there was one more big hill to climb before we could call it home free. I made it to the hill doing 25mph and at the top of the hill I was doing about 10mph (the speed limit there is 25). Once I got over the top of the hill speed picked back up a little and I made it the rest of the way home doing about 30mph.

So the official range right now is about 20 miles. I would say the practical range is probably more like 15 miles. It was very sluggish by the time I pulled into the driveway.

No pictures or video for this weekend. I haven’t forgotten about the wiring diagrams though, I will work on those this week and get them posted soon.