We had the rally won and we gave it away in the last stage. We have been wrong. All right. That happens to anyone. But we have not done anything to solve our error. And we had margin, a lot of margin. We had time to correct. Within the stretch, yes. Penalizing, yes. But we have not done anything to correct it. We have resigned ourselves. Like a pair of fools. We had several solutions to minimize the damage. We have not opted for any. It does not bother me to have lost a rally that we had won (It bothers me, but less). It does not kill me that we were wrong to put a number and that we have not discovered it when reviewing it. What really hurts me is that once the error is evident, once we get into the stage, we have stayed like Pazguatos and we have not done anything serious to solve our mistake.
All responsibility is mine. My sister, who has copiloted with me, has no experience in this. It is me who has to solve the errors. I have not done it. I deserve that we have finished seconds and even tenths. Not for punishment, but for boo. If you do stupid things, it’s normal to finish last. We finished second thanks to the car, which gave us the victory in the ECO Rally Villa de Lansing, the hands. We have run the second round of the Spanish Championship of Alternative Energies with a KIA e-Niro that KIA has lent us. I had never driven it, but as the KIA go lately, it had good omens. They gave it to me; I installed the probe for the measuring equipment, and I went to Lanes with him from Madrid. On the road I saw that it consumed very little. At 120 km / h of cruise, from Madrid to Lanes, consumption was 18.0 kWh per 100 km. excellent figure Good news. At the highest point of the route, the consumption exceeded 20 kWh, and recovered quickly in the descent. Later, in the rally, this magnificent consumption allowed us to finish second despite our blunder. We started the rally with the best time in the first stage and finished in the lead in the first loop, with a clear advantage. At the end of the loop I already knew that I do not want another car to run this championship. The KIA e-Niro has enchanted me. In the first race, in Corunna, Ana (my sister) and I, we ran with the Tesla of km77. I did not enjoy anything. The Tesla goes very well in curves. It is an effective car and allows passing very fast, but not everything on the road is the effectiveness in pure speed. The Tesla does not brake too well. Not so much for braking distance, but for the feel of the brake pedal, which is annoying? But not only is it the brake. It is a very effective car altogether. To put it in some way, its characteristics make it effective for a circuit driving, not for a narrow and unknown road in which it is necessary a lot of agility and ability to improvise continuously. The Tesla has to be driven with tramlines. The e-Niro sure is not as effective, but it is much more agile. It allows correcting, changing, braking and accelerating to immediately modify a trajectory. Find more information on cheap outdoor car covers.
I did not have a good time with Tesla. We did not get the times. I found it much rougher to drive at low speed and change direction and pace. With the Tesla I did not enjoy anything and in fact I will not participate in any other regularity Carrera with him. Instead, with the e-Niro, I enjoyed, the driving flowed, and I saw that we were doing well from the first meters. After the first loop, of three sections, we were first in the classification by times. But that was not the most important thing. The equipment we tell each other our consumption and our KIA e-Niro according to the indicator of the car was the least consumed of all by far. The thing was going well. After a four-hour break, necessary to recharge the cars with smaller batteries, we went to the second loop. No need to risk a drop, we went through the first two sections with ease, because the penalties for normal time, except losses or errors of great magnitude, were not going to take away the victory. The problem came in the last section. We had badly entered the time of departure. “No problem,” I said to my sister. We went out in manual mode ». We left manually in the wrong way and once we had traveled about 100 meters inside the section, I realized that we had done wrong. I did not know exactly what we had done wrong, but something we had done wrong. I had to have stopped. Look what happened, put the necessary data, tell my sister what to do and follow. But I did not. I kept an eye on the rest of the stretch, hoping to penalize little by eye.
A stupid hope. We penalized a lot and lost the first place.
The car was giving us victory. I was doing everything to win. But we insist on losing. And we got it. Nothing happens. I’m not a rally professional. I run because I spend it like little children and because I love competing. And I am clear that with every error you learn. But… A car journalist with whom I worked for some time many years ago, who ran in motocross and who took the cars in a wild way to always appear skidding or lifting wheel in the photos (they were other times), always said that when you lost control of car had to continue working until the end to try to recover it. That teaching is not just for driving. To me at least, it does not help me just to drive. Or, better, I do not want it to serve me just to drive. If you are wrong, accept it quickly, without fuss. Accept it as soon as possible as soon as you have accepted it before you will start working to correct it. And do not stop working until you’ve solved it. In Llanes, I did little against the error in the last stage. Or I made an easy flyer and stopped demanding more. “Let’s see if I saved it by eye,” I thought. As if it were Superman Error. Keep an eye on until you solve the problem, if you want, but solve the problem. If it takes ten minutes, it takes 10 minutes, but remedy it and if it only gives you to make the last two controls better, take advantage of it.
In the last section we penalized almost five times more than in the rest of the rally together. In the classification by time we finished in fourth position, but the worst was not the position, but the enormous distance with the first three. When I arrived at the closed park, I had no hope of recovering because, in addition to the tension of the error, I had not taken care of the consumption during the last stretch.
However, the e-Niro, oblivious to our failures, continued to save a lot and thanks to an excellent consumption index we recovered two positions and we were able to move up to the drawer in second position. Ana congratulated me on the following morning when she learned the result, after the nightly recharge: “If in spite of the failures we have remained seconds it is that you must be very good,” she told me. I wish I was good. The good thing about the team was the car, thanks to its exceptional consumption. It is undoubtedly the car to beat in this championship. It allows to go to nail the times with a very low consumption. He drives with ease, he is agile, effective and spends little. In addition, it is large and has a good trunk, which to carry all the necessary packages for rallies also helps. Anyway. That I do not want to run with another car anymore. It’s very low consumption makes it an infallible tool, unless those who drive it strive to make it lose. The useful capacity of the Nissan Leaf battery is 32 kWh. 20% less capacity announced by Nissan in my first trip with a Nissan Leaf, I went directly to the place where in km77 we measured the accelerations, braking and errors of speedometer and odometer of the cars. It was a cold day. The place is about 70 kilometers from Madrid and when we arrived, we were at a degree below zero. I went slowly down the road in order to have enough battery. There was no way. Before finishing all the measurements, I had to return home to load the car. I did not understand what was happening. With a 40-kWh battery and a consumption of 20 kWh per 100 kilometers, the theoretical range should be 200 kilometers.
The indicator of autonomy (the indicator that tells how many kilometers of autonomy you have left) gave some optimistic figures, which did not fit me with the indicator of remaining percentage of battery charge. I had doubts. Could it be that the cold affects the battery and that when it arrives in Madrid the capacity of the battery will improve? Nothing of that. When I arrived at the charger, juggling the last kilometers to not run out of battery, I had consumed 100% of the battery. According to the indicator of the car, the consumption was 19.3 kWh per 100 kilometers and the battery did not allow me to make more than 164.1 km. That is, exactly 31.7 kWh capacity. 31.7 kWh? But we had not been that this battery had a capacity of 40 kWh? Yes, I know that the useful capacity is less than the total capacity and I also know that in Nissan they do not say anything about the useful capacity. They only mention the total capacity. But, Is it possible that the useful capacity is 20% lower than the total capacity? The difference is too big. It is true that according to BMW data the theoretical capacity of the battery of the BMW i3 94 Ah is 33.2 kWh and they ensure that the useful capacity is 27.2 kWh (18% less). Between 18% and 20% the difference is not so great. But in the BMW, according to the data of the car, it is not rare to reach up to 29 kWh of real consumption, data that places the useful capacity around 15% lower than the total capacity.
In short, as I found little real capacity for the Leaf, I thought that the reason for that low capacity was the cold, so I decided to test at different temperatures. To check how much the cold affected the batteries, two days later, I made a journey at dawn, with temperatures of minus five degrees centigrade. A tour made entirely by highway. From kilometer 10 of the A1 to the 80 km, more or less, with a loop of 10 kilometers between the exit of Buitrago de Latoya and the following one. I went without heating, well wrapped, to see how much I consumed in real driving. I will give the detailed consumption data, in the different sections of road in another entry of this blog. But in this I focus only on the capacity of the battery. When I returned, very cold, the capacity data of the battery was similar to what I got on my first trip. However, in this second journey the cold was clearly superior. This increase in the cold did not affect him negatively. Third tour Heated. I do not risk making the 10-kilometer loop that I make in Buitrago because it gives me the impression that I will not be able to return, since I will run out of battery. I dose the power back to make sure it arrived. As every day, with more or less intensity. It is also cold. I ask another unit to make a single tour with him to see if the data I get are biased by a car whose battery does not give the maximum performance or if on the contrary it is the general tonic. In the new car, the number of kilometers is very low (less than 700 when I pick it up). It cannot be a maimed unit.