Reverse Engineering the Nissan Leaf's Range Display
Geeks are textbook early adopters. We can't resist a new gadget, or pushing the envelope to find out what's really possible! I'm no exception to this rule. Recently, our family took delivery of a new Nissan Leaf, a completely electric vehicle. I now breeze by gas stations with $4 per gallon prices and think how I'll never pull into one of these places and spend dozens of dollars to fill up. Of course, the downside to all-electric is that when your battery runs out, you don't have a little gas engine to get you home. This causes range anxiety , which is the fear of being stranded on the side of the road because of exceeding the range of the battery charge. The Leaf range display is somewhat twitchy. It's trying to predict how many miles you have left in your range (as a one-way measurement), depending on battery charge, your driving habits, speed, temperature, use of climate control and so on. As a geek, I knew that the engineers designing the Leaf would ...