Highway Star

It's a common misconception that hybrid cars are not suited for highways.
Some people says the electric engine won't even kick in.
That's not correct, as the electric engine is nearly always contributing to the car movement.
Here's a chart of a 220 km highway trip: the red line shows how many amperes are flowing out of the HV battery, thus flowing through the electric engine and helping the petrol engine.

R11

News

• MD Tech BMS sheets are now formatted and painted according to values

MD Tech-nicolor

MD Tech sheets are now painted (by kind request) according to the following schema:

Row colors:

• Light green: car is charging the plugin kit
• Turquoise: car is charging the plugin kit and the HV battery
• Wheat: the plugin kit is supplying power to the car
• Grey: the plugin kit is not in use

Cell colors:

• Green: cell with highest value
• Red: cell with lowest value

Little Diesel Engine vs Yaris Hybrid in a urban landscape

I had the chance to test a car with a little diesel engine (Opel Corsa 1.3 TDCI 95cv) on one of my daily urban commute trips.

The same trip was driven first with the Yaris Hybrid and then with the Corsa, at the same time of the day in 2 consecutive weekdays.

On this road, with the Yaris Hybrid, I have a personal record of 3.5 L/100km, attained in optimal conditions, in the evening, with no traffic, but the recording I'm going to analyze refers to a less than stellar 4.2 L/100km.

On a trip of 4 km, the engine was off for 63.56% of the time, with a total of 2.23 km driven with the electric engine alone.

On the same track, the diesel engine scored 5.2 L/100km, with a comfort and a noise far worse than the hybrid car.

The diesel engine was equipped with a start-stop system, but it never kicked in.
I suspect the A/C was preventing the engine from stopping.
This is another notable difference with the hybrid, that doesn't suffer from this limit.


There are some others different behaviors of the engine:
On the diesel car, RPMs of the engine are mostly proportional to the car speed.
On the hybrid car, this is not the case.
In the same chart, the engine load is also present: the hybrid engine always works with an high load.
The diesel engine, especially when decelerating, has a low load.
The average load value for the hybrid is 84.63% versus 53.35% of the diesel.

There's a thread about this on the Hybrid Synergy Forum

R10

News:

• fixed occasional "Service Error" when generating maps

Tutorial

Here's quick way to use Torque Log Analyzer.

Make sure you've installed it first, as explained in this link.

Log in to Google Drive and select "Settings"

Make sure "Convert uploads" is NOT selected

Change language settings

Select English / United States

Go back to Drive
Drag and drop a Torque CSV log file

The imported file will be uploaded to your Drive

Now select it with the right mouse button and open it with Google Sheet

Select "Add-ons/Torque Log Analyzer/Start"

A sidebar will open: select "Analyze" to start.
You can add additional analytics before selecting "Analyze", or just add them later and run "Analyze" again.

Use Torque Log Analyzer as a stand-alone sheet

Before becoming an Add-on, Torque Log Analyzer was available as a stand-alone sheet.
This page contains instructions about using it, mainly for historical purposes: this is not the preferred way of using it.

Torque Log Analyzer is still available as a stand-alone script in the download section of this site.
Note that you can view the full source code also, so it may be useful if you're learning Google Script.

Anyone interested can go to the Downloads section and get Torque Log Analyzer.
Make a copy of the spreadsheet into your own Google Drive.

Open your fresh copy.
Select from menu "File / Import"

Select "Replace current sheet" and then select your trackLog.csv file
Check the preview and then select "Import".

Select "OK" and "Accept" the following authorization requests

The sheet will be replaced by the content of your log file.
Select analytics and then click "Analyze".

If the sidebar doesn't appear, select "Start" from the "Add-ons" menu.

Spreadsheet will be populated with new columns and new sheet containing analysis and statistics about the trip you logged in trackLog.csv.
Also check for the "Log" sheet for any errors.