Discharging

[HauntedMyst]

I've seen people write you should just drive you car until it starts to slow down, then discharge it. Why? Why wouldn't you run it until it cant go any further, and then pick it up and run out the pack? My discharge takes all day to discharge a pack with is frustrating.

[Railman]

In my opinion running the batt all the way down by running it till it stops is hard on all the electrical equipment. The amperage draw is really high under low rpm conditions. Motors are designed with a lot of timing advance to run efficiently at higher rpm's, not at low speeds. If you run packs way below the recomended cutoff voltage recomended by the batt manufacturers, they will temporarily reverse the polarity of the weaker batts in a pack. Most newer discharge trays only take about 10 to 15 minutes to bring batts down. We have two old style Integys with a heat sink that I can take 10 or so packs down to 0 volts in about an hour or so, ready for deadshorting. You need to have the high rate trays to do this though.
Just my $.02

[old phart]

What is the reason for dead shorting a pack? How do you do it?

In reference to your info above, if you wanted to purposely go very slow, say for rock crawling, would it be advisable to retard the timing heavily?