Power meter could be a great aftermarket add-on. No need to mess with the wiring, just find an accessible site to slip a Hall sensor around one of the power cables. Mount a nice big analog meter on the otherwise barren dash. I converted the tach on my vintage 1988 EV to a power meter and it really is quite useful especially on hills. Not distracting at all, I can see what it's doing in peripheral vision without glancing down.
Glad to hear someone verify this. There's an old Fully Charged video where Robert is completely flummoxed when his wife gets better mileage with accelerator regen turned off than he does with it on max. Certainly in theory coasting should be more efficient than constantly going into regen. Intuitively people think max regen means max range, but every time you go into regen the energy has to go through the gearing, through the motor, through the inverter, into the batteries, then back through all 4 steps when you accelerate back to the original speed or go back up the hill. Not sure what the overall recovery is, but there's got to be a few percent loss at each step.
This would depend on the driving situation, and the driver's actions. Street driving with lots of intersections/stops, you probably want as much regen as you can get. Highway/long stretches, there may be areas you want to truly coast. You should be able to coast even with max regen, just need to find the right level to hold the accelerator at. In many (not all) cases where you aren't intersection to intersection the easy and close to optimal option is probably cruise control.
for sure, there are efficiency losses with regen, but you really can't throw such a broad blanket over an anecdotal comparison like that. There are so many other factors in any given drive.
I am confident that Hackers and Makers will fine tune many aspects of the Slate truck. I have been driving for a lot of years and aside from homebrew EVs, this Slate seems more like a community project than any other vehicle I have driven. I believe that the words "locked out" will have no meaning what so ever in this community.
There should be some "dead band" in the pedal between accelerating and regen, where you can coast.
With 1PD there is coasting, by holding the pedal at a certain depth. That will be the "dead band" I mentioned. Exactly where in the pedal's travel it is we won't know until we can drive it, but you should be able to find it.
I understand, but I want the dead zone to be when the pedal is fully released.
I don't know the exact rules the NHTSA takes when it comes to modifying the software of vehicles, if they even do. I know some states have tried to stamp down on it for tuners and diesel emissions control people, so Slate may be forced to come out and try to stop users from doing real deep mods of the truck software to play nice with regulators.
To me that says that you want the first bit of movement of the standard brake pedal to initiate regen braking. That sounds OK to me. Maybe I'll think differently once I drive with one pedal drive.
