Whats with that blue cup?

What blue cup? This one on the dash:

I’ve covered it a little bit in the posting “What Can Your dash tell you?” but I figured it could use a bit more explanation.

You can find the blue cup on the left display (the Message Center). There are several ways to show it: As a few options in “Display Mode” and as one of the screens in “Energy”. When you configure the “Display Mode” custom view make sure you grab the indicator as shown above (you can select it with or without tick marks–the tick marks are important…keep reading).

This display shows you 3 items all related to power consumption: Your “instantaneous” value of Watt hours per mile (the white line), your average Watt hours per mile for the current trip (white tick marks) and the “blue cup”. These items are related to the budget display and the guess-o-meter as follows:

The guess-o-meter uses an average power consumption value (similar to the white tick marks) to estimate the range remaining on the battery: As the white tick marks move down (a lower average) you’ll notice that the range to empty shown on the guess-o-meter will increase (an educated guess).

The budget display shows the range to empty based on when you started your trip (or the distance to the next waypoint/destination). The all important blue cup shows you where your power consumption needs to be in order to make the budget. If you can keep the white tick marks at or below the level of the blue cup you’ll be able to drive the budget distance (or make it to the next waypoint/destination).

This indicator contributes greatly to the “video game feel” of driving the FFE around: You’re constantly trying to “beat your score” by keeping the tick marks well below the top of the blue cup. It becomes more and more challenging because the blue cup will get shorter for more efficient drives thus as you make trip after trip driving efficiently the blue cup will get shorter and shorter until you can’t possibly get any more efficient but you’ll try anyway LOL.

About that white line: The white line will move up and down in realtime as you speed up and slow down. You can’t possibly use the white line to modulate your power consumption (good luck keeping it in the blue cup while your climbing even a modest grade). You can try to keep it in the blue cup as much as possible but the real indicator if your driving efficiently is the tick marks.

If you don’t really like the fancy graphics of the blue cup display you can always just use the hard numbers approach: Instead of the blue cup display set the Message Center to show the enhanced trip meter. The enhanced trip meter will show miles driven, power consumed, average Wh/mile, and elapsed time since last reset. The trick to using the trip meter is to reset the meter when the car is fully charged and try to minimize the average Wh/mile value.

The video game nature of these displays makes it easy and fun to maximize your range when driving the FFE around.