larryh

The lCE will continue to run after engine braking until warmed up. Regenerative braking no longer works. It has to use the friction brakes so it will feel different.

The 3G modem no longer reports EV range for me. The EV range reported at MFM is always 0.

Last weekend my car also failed to update properly with MFM. I ended up with a dead 12 V battery on Tuesday morning. Maybe you want to pull the fuse and reset the TCU and hopefully the car will begin communicating again with MFM. Is it possible that the car is attempting to charge the 12 V battery rather than the HVB? Is the TCU draining the 12 V battery?

I noted sparks every time I connected/disconnected the 12 V battery. The lights and other things were attempting to drawing significant current from the battery, but the battery couldn't provide enough power to illuminate the lights or start the car. There must have been some other significant power drain. If hydrogen could be present, then there would be a problem connecting/disconnecting the battery and one needs to be careful doing so. The car will eventually recalibrate the SOC calculation of the 12 V battery after the car has been turned off for a while. At the moment, it computes the SOC of the 12 V battery to be 100%.

I don't know why it would make a difference where it is connected. I connected it to the battery terminals in the trunk. I had disconnected the battery hoping the battery would recover enough to start the car. So I was in the trunk. There was a large drain on the battery everytime I attempted to connect the terminals. The car needed to be jump started. When fully charged, I measure 12.25 V across the terminals of the Powerall.

The Deluxe: http://thepowerall.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=304_305&product_id=93 It was $66 through Amazon Prime with free 2-hour delivery. Otherwise, it is $77 with 2-day shipping. Strange.

You need and OBD II scanner and the ForScan application running on at tablet PC or smart phone to read the SOC from the car. It currently reads 80%. You can also measure the 12 battery voltage with all the doors closed and everything powered down. It reads 13.2 V at the moment. So it is fully charged.

My 12 V battery was completely drained this morning. So I ordered a $66 Powerall portable battery charger from Amazon using Prime Now and jump started the car. It arrived within 2 hours as advertised. I had to use the key to open the door and fold down the back seat and use a weed puller to open the trunk. Looking back at my logs, the SOC of the 12 V battery was fine for the past week, around 85% (which is normal). I note that in the previous two days, there was excessive 12 V battery drain/charging while the car was on and running (more than 10x the normal amount). There was no significant drain while the car was sleeping or off. Also, the car was generating the warning tone when the car was started, but no indicator lights came on. Something was wrong. Yesterday morning the SOC was 77%. This morning when I jump started it, it was 18%. Something had failed to turn off last night. I suspect it was the TCU. The TCU no longer works at various locations. AT&T must have ceased 2G operations in those areas. When I arrive home, where 2G still works, the car uploads all the previous trips that it couldn't upload while I was away from home. Last weekend, it failed to upload the previous days data when I returned home from a trip. I suspect the 2G outages are confusing the TCU. I will have to monitor what the car is doing more carefully in the future to determine what is not turning off. I have the car currently plugged in so that it can charge the 12V battery. It charges the 12 V while charging the HVB and continues to charge the 12 V after the HVB has finished. SOC so far is back up to 72%.

Others have reported that Ford is coming out with a new TCU to replace the old 2G TCU. The replacement is supposed to be free. If the dealer had waited to replace the TCU, you might have been able to replace it without cost. If the dealer replaced the TCU with another 2G TCU, that is really dumb. ATT is dropping its 2G network by the end of this year. It is going to have to be replaced again after ATT completely drops its support for 2G.

MyFordMobile.com logs HVB charging. It indicates the SOC of the HVB after it has been charged. You could show that to the dealer.

You want to delay charging until the last possible minute and then use the car immediately after charging completes. Charging the car any sooner than necessary will result in greater HVB degradation. Ideally, you would want to use a 240 V charger and start charging the car at 5:30 am so the car is ready at 7:30 am.

The data is available at MyFordMobile.com.

This is from Ford's web site for the 2017 Fusion Energi: **MyFord Mobile subscription complimentary for five years from the vehicle sale date as recorded by the dealer. Subscription fees apply after five years. MyFord Mobile requires a compatible 2.5G independent cellular network. Evolving technology and cellular networks may affect future availability and functionality. Text and data rates apply to usage.

The temperature gauge shows the temperature inside the heater core--not the engine block temperature. You can see the actual value of the temperature in the heater core using ET mode.

The amount of energy stored in the battery should be the same regardless of what charger is used. The main factors affect energy capacity of the battery are temperature and degradation. A hot battery stores more energy than a cold one.

The car does not provide that information directly. You need an OBD II adapter and either the Forscan or Torque Pro App in order to get the PID "Energy to Empty" which is how many kWh of energy the BECM (Battery Energy Control Module) thinks is in the battery. The car only displays the kWh of energy consumed after the fact.

For the past 12 months, I have spent $344 on fuel and electricity. For the previous 12 months, it was $404. Other than that, my only maintenance expenses were yearly oil changes and a few tire rotations and balancing. I had some updates applied to several of the computer modules the first year to correct bugs. I had the rear view camera replaced under warranty last year. I have 36,000 miles.

My lot is 0.3 acres, so it only takes 45 minutes to mow the lawn. I have the EGO lawn mower. They have a novel way to keep the battery cool: To cool the battery, EGO uses a special material wrapped around the batteries. When the battery is a cold, the material is a solid. When the battery heats up, it turns to a liquid. The transition from sold to liquid absorbs a great deal of energy, similar to ice transitioning to water. That keeps the battery cool.

I recently purchased a battery powered lawn mower. It uses the same type of Lithium-ion cells that Tesla uses. The battery pack has 3 parallel series of 14 cells for a total of 42 cells. The total energy capacity of the battery is about 0.36 kWh. I was able to mow my lawn today using about 0.29 kWh of energy from the battery--it still had 15-25% SOC left. The last time I mowed my lawn with a gas powered lawn mower (10+ years old), it required 0.27 gallons of gas. The energy released by 0.27 gallons of gas is 0.27*33.705 = 9.1 kWh. The gas powered mower required 9.1/0.29 = 32 times the energy of the electric mower to mow my lawn. Gas powered mowers are extremely inefficient!

This morning, I set the timer to charge the car at 3:45 am rather than 3:00 am. I unplugged the charger before charging completed at 84% SOC. The plot below shows the difference in estimated battery lifetime between last week and today. The difference was less than expected for two reasons: the high temperature for today and yesterday was 90 F vs. 80 F last week, and I used less energy for the commute to work today than last week so the SOC was higher than it would otherwise have been. Last week the estimated battery lifetime for my commute to work was 11.3 years. Today it is 13.6 years. So by charging 45 minutes later and only charging to 84% rather than 97%, the estimated lifetime of the battery increases by 2.3 years. It would have been more if it was not 10 F degrees warmer this week than last. Note that the blue curve (lifetime estimate for today) is mostly above the red curve (lifetime estimate from last week). It starts out below at time 5:00 pm (yesterday) because the battery was warmer at 107 F vs. 84 F last week. I charged and drove the car an additional 12 miles after work yesterday which warmed up the battery. The battery cooled down to 88 F by 3:45 am this morning when charging began. Charging warmed the battery to 90 F. The commute to work warmed it further to 93. During the day, it only cooled down to 91 by 4:00 pm. So the battery was a little warmer than last week. The SOC of the battery while parked at work was 63% and after my commute home it is now at 38%. So both of those numbers are lower than last week. The lower SOC more than offsets the higher temperatures with respect to battery lifetime.

That doesn't seem like "smart" preconditioning to me. The car is trying to guess your schedule and you have no control over it. The car is going to waste energy preconditioning the car when you are not going anywhere and will fail to precondition it when you do want to go somewhere. They need to allow you to enter your schedule on a calendar. Can you at least control the times of day when the car will charge, i.e. similar to MFM enter cost windows for time of day electric rates? Perhaps there are third party applications that give you more control over preconditioning and charging the car?

The Chevy Volt has active liquid cooling that attempts to maintain the battery temperature at 25 C (77 F) when the car is on or plugged in. I’m not sure how Tesla manages battery temperature, but I assume it does something similar. At 80% SOC and 25 C, the battery should last 10 years. At 50% SOC and 25 C, the battery should last 20 years. Using active liquid cooling avoids the high battery temperatures that occur in cars with passive or active air cooling (such as the Energi) during the summer. As a result, battery degradation is not as much of a problem with the Tesla. In the winter, cold temperatures aggravate battery degradation. A battery may have 5% capacity loss in the summer, but in the winter, the capacity loss may be twice as much or 10% (versus when the battery was new). This is on top of capacity loss due cold temperatures, i.e. a cold battery stores less energy than a warm battery. In the summer, when my car was new, I was able to get about 5.9 kWh of energy out of the battery. In the winter, it was around 5.5 kWh. So due to the cold, the battery stored 0.4 kWh less energy. After three years, I get 5.6 kWh during the summer and 4.9 kWh during the winter. The battery now stores 0.7 kWh less energy in the winter. So during the summer, the loss due to battery degradation after three years is 5.9 – 5.6 = 0.3 kWh. During the winter, the degradation loss is 5.5 – 4.9 = 0.6 kWh, i.e. twice as much. Tesla warms the battery in Winter (when plugged in), so both capacity losses due to higher degradation and lower storage capacity with colder temperatures are eliminated. In theory, you should be able to get about the same amount of energy from the battery in the winter as in the summer. I wonder if that is what owners observe. Also, I wonder how much energy Tesla consumes to heat and cool the battery. Hopefully Tesla has GO times similar to the Energi that allow you to precondition the car. In the winter time, there is no point wasting energy to heat the battery 24 hours a day when plugged in if you are not going anywhere. Also, it would be advantageous to leave the battery cooler than normal in the Winter to take advantage of the cooler temperatures and slow down battery degradation. Leaving the battery at 25 C and 80% SOC yields a lifetime of 10 years. However, if you left the battery below 50 F, lifetime goes up to 25 years. Tesla should allow you to enter your driving schedule on a calendar and your time of day electric rates, so that it can optimize the cost of energy and minimize battery degradation.

Below is an updated table from my previous post to add average cell voltage, variation between cell voltages, and variation between cell SOC: Avg Cell Variation Variation Time SOC Volts Cell Volts Cell SOC Temp16:14 15.80% 3.44 0.072 0.6% 98.6 F 16:48 9.29% 3.44 0.062 0.9% 98.6 F 17:56 8.86% 3.45 0.057 1.1% 96.8 F 18:08 15.99% 3.55 0.006 1.1% 96.8 F It seems strange that SOC went down at 17:56 but cell voltage went up. In any case, all the cell voltages at time 16:14 are at least 3.44-0.072= 3.37 V (above the 3.0 V low voltage threshold for damaging the cell). They are also above the threshold at the other times. So the cells should not be harmed by the low SOC. The one thing that charging at time 18:08 seems to do is to balance the cells. Before charging, the variation in the cell voltages was slowly decreasing from 0.072 volts. After charging, it was reduced to 0.006 volts. Unbalanced cells puts stress on the weaker cells. So it might be prudent to charge the HVB for a few minutes after depleting it to bring the cells into balance. During the week, when I return home from work and the HVB SOC is around 40%, the variation in cell voltages is at most 0.009. So fully depleting the HVB causes the cells to become more unbalanced. If you don't go deeply into hybrid mode, the cells should be relatively well balanced at the end of the trip.

Here's another example of the battery SOC falling after a 60 mile commute. I arrived home at 4:14 pm and let the battery sit for a couple of hours. I measured the HVB SOC and temperature at 4:48 pm and then again at 5:56 pm. Time SOC Temp 16:14 15.80% 98.6 F 16:48 9.29% 98.6 F 17:56 8.86% 96.8 F The first SOC drop from 15.8% to 9.29% was probably due to BECM estimation errors. The drop from 9.29% to 8.86% was probably due to a temperature drop in the HVB. I wonder how far it would drop if I let it continue to cool. It better not fall below 0% SOC. I then charged the battery up to 15.99% at 6:08 pm. The difference in the degradation rate between 8.86% and 15.99% is small, 21.7 years vs. 20.5 years.

MFM and Value Charge are hard to work with. They seem to have a mind of their own and do what they want--not want you want or what is best for the battery. I have a timer attached to the charger, I can adjust that to determine when charging starts. The industry standard criteria for end of life of a battery for an EV is established by the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC). A battery has reached end of life when either: 1. The net delivered capacity of a cell, module, or battery is less than 80% of its rated capacity when measured on the DST (Reference Performance Test); or 2. The peak power capability (determined using the Peak Power Test) is less than 80% of the rated power at 80% DoD. DoD (depth of discharge) is defined as: The ratio of the net Ampere-hours discharged from a battery at a given rate to the rated capacity. I am only considering the first criteria regarding capacity of the battery. To be complete, I would also have to model the resistance growth rate of the battery, i.e. the top chart in the first post. But since the Energi is a PHEV, peak power is of less concern to me. Unlike a pure BEV, we have an ICE to provide additional power if needed. In most of the papers I have read, the second criteria regarding peak power occurs first. The tests are performed at 30 C. For details, see: https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sti/4655291.pdf.