I have been driving around for the last few days with my motor current limit set to 400 amps and the motor voltage limit set to 120 volts. This keeps me out of arcing for the most part, except when I hold the accelerator all the way down for more than a couple seconds. If I heard arcing, I would let up on the accelerator a little and then ease it back down.
This is no way to drive around. I really need to be able to stomp on the pedal and know that everything is going to be OK. I did some more drive testing and settled on a value of 108 volts as keeping me out of arcing no matter what I do to the pedal.
The funny thing is that I don’t really notice any practical difference in performance between 108 or 120 volts. I can get up to 30mph in first gear and 45 in second. Third takes me up to about 60 and I can get to 70 in fourth. This is pretty much in line with my expectations. I probably had been backing off on the throttle before I could get to 120 volts.
Now that I have water cooling installed on my controller, I increased my current limit up to 600 amps (the maximum). The early results look like it’s hard to maintain 600 amps for more than about 1.5 seconds before the controller goes into thermal cutback. The cutback goes down to just over 500 amps. This still needs more testing.