Elevating trippler

I’ve finally incorporated elevation changes in trippler resilient EV trip planning.

Elevation is a feature I’d always considered, but it never made it to the top of my priority list. Through field testing, I’d concluded that only net changes mattered – as regeneration on descent recovered almost all of what was lost to climbing – and net elevation changes were generally minor.

A recent camping trip to the Victorian alps changed my assessment of:

• the benefit, as the +10% SOC required for 1,600m elevation gain on the drive was relevant to planning an overnight camp at altitude, and
• the effort, when I realised openrouteservice elevation line was a shortcut to getting all required elevations.

With elevation for all trip locations (start, end, waypoints and chargers), only minor changes were required to the planner:

1. Calculate a matrix of elevation changes, similar to the distance matrix,
2. Add an input for gross vehicle weight (mass),
3. Determine the SOC consumption (or generation) due to vehicle weight and elevation changes, considered against battery capacity, and
4. Add this to the SOC consumption due to distances between trip locations.

And it just works!

Except for the neat edge case (which I will leave for now) of net regeneration on descent taking us above 100% SOC!

New camping features

New camping features were also easy to build as an extension to recent consumption moderation features. For stops en-route, trippler users can now also specify:

• SOC consumption in stationary “camp” or “utility” mode
• Total side-trip distance that would also consume SOC at the stop/camp