PHEV battery capacity down to 9kWh

[whynot]

I have had an Outlander PHEV for over a year and it has done just over 14,000km. It is a great vehicle and I love it.

It used daily to drive to and from work, plus a few long country trips. The PHEV is connected to a dedicated power circuit that has a utility grade meter for capturing one-minute interval data. When the PHEV was new, it was taking on board 10kWh of charge when flat. Of late, the PHEV has been arriving at home with the petrol engine running (due to an empty battery) and only being taking on board 9kWh of charge each evening. I appreciate that battery capacity will decline over time, but this seems to be somewhat excessive. Do any other owners have a similar experience?

 

[maby]

I think someone here said that the loss of capacity was likely to be at its greatest in the first year or two, then level out till the battery was approaching end of life. Pors is going in for its 12000 mile service tomorrow and I've asked for the capacity to be checked - it will be interesting to see what figure they come up with.

 

[Ozukus]

whynot,

I actuall checked my chargevision history, and found that my charge performance is actually pretty good as can be seen from this graph.

http://www.dropshots.com/Ozukus/date/2015-09-21/10:45:49

Interestingly if I add a trend line to the chart it actually shows the trend going from 11 to 12 over that period.

 

[jaapv]

it is very hard to draw any conclusion from these data. Best contact your dealer and have them measure the state of the battery. They should have a measurement from the delivery as well and will be able to tell you whether the car is within tolerance.

 

[anko]

Ozukus, it seems to me as if you are suffering from major losses. 12 kW per charge is way more than you would ever expect. Even 11 seems an awful lot. 12 kWh * 70% = 8.4 kWh useful capacity. Where did the rest go?

Do you use a very long and thin extension cord?

 

[gwatpe]

The only measurement that MMC will act on is the PHEV battery Ah number. The dealer can extract this for you, or you can get it yourself from the OBD2 port and a WiFi adapter and use the method of anko with a telnet app on phone, pad, or PC to have the car output the data, that you need to convert the hex code to the Ah.

If you get the data yourself and it is under 34Ah, then I would have dealer perform the specific test as a warranty claim an move on from there.

I suspect that the access to fast charging will make any warranty claim more difficult, so you will need to have good records of recharging to back up you usage.

I have only recharged a few times from an empty battery over 3 PHEV's. My usage pattern of only recharging when the gauge is under half full, and normally around 1/4 showing has after 39000km and 9 months the battery is still about 37.3Ah as measure by the anko method.

 

[gwatpe]

I will be checking PHEV data before recharging and after recharging to measured kWh from the power point in coming weeks and will be able to give some objective info to this discussion.

 

[Ozukus]

Ozukus, it seems to me as if you are suffering from major losses. 12 kW per charge is way more than you would ever expect. Even 11 seems an awful lot. 12 kWh * 70% = 8.4 kWh useful capacity. Where did the rest go?

Do you use a very long and thin extension cord?

I have a dedicated RCD with about 5 metres of externally rated cable running from the RCD to the outside of my house and into the Porch where the charger is located with a tethered cable.

http://dropshots.com/Ozukus/date/2014-12-24/13:01:59

As for the stats they are from the Charge Vision application for my Polar charger, I expect that the level of accuracy of that site is fairly poor, however the applied algorithm would be consistent. I've also never seen a drop in range so again expect my battery is in fairlyl good condition after nearly 10 months.

 

[whynot]

The only measurement that MMC will act on is the PHEV battery Ah number.

Thanks for info on the process to follow. Just to be clear, I am an electrician and the electricity meter that I am using to capturing charging data on my side of the socket is an EDMI Atlas Mk7C (the same one as used by electricity utilities). The distance of the daily commute is such that it is borderline on the PHEV battery range. It now arrives home with the battery exhausted (well, as exhausted as the PHEV will let it go). It is a pain to get it back to the car dealership, so, I might leave it until the next service.

 

[jaapv]

The problem is that the range varies with driving style, temperature, weather, wind etc.
Battery/charging performance varies with temperature.
As we are in transition between the seasons, we are bound to see differences.

 

[Kim]

Back in the days I installed this cheepo chinese V/Amp/kW/kWH.. - Meter into one of my my ICCBs

Before: (click for bigger pic)


After: (click for bigger pic)


So I don't really know, how accurate it is. But it should still give me useful numbers relative to itself.

When my Outi was brand new, it showed a max. of 9.78 kWh from empty to full
Now after 13.000 km I can reload a max. of around 9.63 kWh.
Aprox. 10 measurements per month here.....

 

[PeterGalbavy]

Temperature definitely makes a difference to the estimate. Recently when I have fired up the PHEV on a cold morning the guess-o-meter drops from my normal 27 to 22 miles.