How is battery state ascertained?

[BertBert]

I'd say the range of our 5 year old Zoe is degraded. How would the battery state be measured? Does it self measure?

[ashenfie]

It does but I think I am correct in saying you need an OBDII dongle to read it, like a CanZE

[BertBert]

Thanks, I'll have a look. i have the dongle from when I was trying to find a problem before. Just got to remember how to use it.

The battery is still leased so in theory has a warranty of some sort of it actually has decreased capacity by an amount.

[SWoll]

ashenfie said:

It does but I think I am correct in saying you need an OBDII dongle to read it, like a CanZE

Should be able to pick one up for around £50 on ebay.

Plenty of youtube videos showing you how to connect etc.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zoe+o...

[Mikehig]

On the subject of battery health and longevity, Autocar has an article:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/batt...

[BertBert]

Thanks. I've still not plugged my dongle in to the Zoe as I can't find it (the dongle, not the car!)

[dapprman]

BertBert said:

Thanks. I've still not plugged my dongle in to the Zoe as I can't find it (the dongle, not the car!)

If you're near Watford or St Albans I think I still have a spare one (more recent version, but modified to work and tested with CanZE).

[BertBert]

dapprman said:

If you're near Watford or St Albans I think I still have a spare one (more recent version, but modified to work and tested with CanZE).

Thanks, most kind, I'm in Epsom. I think I've worked out where I put it, will look this evening when I get in.

[OutInTheShed]

Mikehig said:

On the subject of battery health and longevity, Autocar has an article:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/batt...

Interesting article, although the % degradation of cells is pretty close to what you'd expect from typical cell-makers' datasheets.

It goes on to quote some bloke: "“Although batteries degrade over time, for third owners and beyond, driving range is less of an issue. The car is probably a second or third vehicle for short trips, and in any case the car is much cheaper than a new one, so they make allowances. "

Which is perhaps accurate in today's market, where a well-used EV is most likely a Leaf as a shopping trolley or local commuting machine.
It's not so true for the shed driver who's looking to have an EV on the cheap to replace a serious car.

Our 'long distance car' almost never leaves the drive to do less than 20 miles, average trip is probably 80 miles, more than half its mileage comes from round trips of over 300 miles.
Our 'local car' AKA 'her car' mostly doesn't leave the county, but frequently does 50 mile round trips.

I get the feeling that in future , a household like us will be paying more for our motoring in future.
That's not a crisis for me, we can afford it.

But it's a different world from when I first owned a car, a £100 banger which I drove wherever I wanted to go.
I drove to North Wales a few times, York, Cornwall, Dover in my first car.
Later when I had a dodgy car, somebody said to me that a car which you can't drive wherever you want to go is a waste of money. If you can't drive to Aberystwyth for a party, you're wasting the tax and insurance on a pile of junk that doesn't serve you.

Long-in-the-tooth BEVs are not going to serve the impecunious motorist the same way that IC bangers did last century.
I suspect 21st Century IC bangers won't either.
TLDR
Battery status is (warranty period) + (todays date) - (date of manufacture).
Tick Tock.....

[Otispunkmeyer]

OutInTheShed said:

Mikehig said:

On the subject of battery health and longevity, Autocar has an article:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/batt...

Interesting article, although the % degradation of cells is pretty close to what you'd expect from typical cell-makers' datasheets.

It goes on to quote some bloke: "“Although batteries degrade over time, for third owners and beyond, driving range is less of an issue. The car is probably a second or third vehicle for short trips, and in any case the car is much cheaper than a new one, so they make allowances. "

Which is perhaps accurate in today's market, where a well-used EV is most likely a Leaf as a shopping trolley or local commuting machine.
It's not so true for the shed driver who's looking to have an EV on the cheap to replace a serious car.

Our 'long distance car' almost never leaves the drive to do less than 20 miles, average trip is probably 80 miles, more than half its mileage comes from round trips of over 300 miles.
Our 'local car' AKA 'her car' mostly doesn't leave the county, but frequently does 50 mile round trips.

I get the feeling that in future , a household like us will be paying more for our motoring in future.
That's not a crisis for me, we can afford it.

But it's a different world from when I first owned a car, a £100 banger which I drove wherever I wanted to go.
I drove to North Wales a few times, York, Cornwall, Dover in my first car.
Later when I had a dodgy car, somebody said to me that a car which you can't drive wherever you want to go is a waste of money. If you can't drive to Aberystwyth for a party, you're wasting the tax and insurance on a pile of junk that doesn't serve you.

Long-in-the-tooth BEVs are not going to serve the impecunious motorist the same way that IC bangers did last century.
I suspect 21st Century IC bangers won't either.
TLDR
Battery status is (warranty period) + (todays date) - (date of manufacture).
Tick Tock.....

I think they're really going to have to get on top of recycling these things The battery will be worth multiples of the car by that time even if the range has degraded to the point it becomes an issue. There is also a little cottage industry going of getting new or refurbed batteries installed. I think Robert Llewelyn (sp?) actually had this done to his 2012 leaf. Old 24 kWh pack taken away, new 40 kWh pack put in. But that did require the availability of a wrecked 40 kwh gen II leaf.

[OutInTheShed]

Otispunkmeyer said:

I think they're really going to have to get on top of recycling these things The battery will be worth multiples of the car by that time even if the range has degraded to the point it becomes an issue. There is also a little cottage industry going of getting new or refurbed batteries installed. I think Robert Llewelyn (sp?) actually had this done to his 2012 leaf. Old 24 kWh pack taken away, new 40 kWh pack put in. But that did require the availability of a wrecked 40 kwh gen II leaf.

Half-knackered batteries from crashed cars are currently worth more than they should be, because they are in short supply.
New cells are of the order of $140USD per kWh at the factory gate. Recycling value of dead cells ranges up to about $40 per kWh, but some people are telling me that's distorted by older cells having more Lithium per kWh.

Some cars are now using LFP (AKA LiFePO4) batteries which have a much lower raw material cost, under $40 per kWh
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/mark...
It seems reasonable to assume these will have a lower scrap value.

Changing battery packs is still in the cottage industry phase, because the 8+ year old cars whose batteries are worn out or time served were only sold in small numbers. And the younger cars which get written off are only being crashed in small numbers :-)

The value of half-knackered battery packs will likely decrease, because better cell management will mean a car wears out its cells more evenly.
Improved manufacturing tends to mean that thing like batteries have closer tolerances over time, so we move towards a situation where a car starts it life with identical cells, treats them identically and gets the same, optimum life out of every cell. So when a battery pack 'dies' there will not be lots of good cells and a few duff ones, they will all be pretty equally shagged out. Today, people will take a scrapped leaf, test each cluster of cells and find some good ones to put on ebay. In future, I think less so!

The market for second user cells is also distorted by the rip off prices of 'home batteries'. When the cheapest way to take home a 40kWh battery pack is to buy a car, the most polite thing we can say about the market is that it is 'immature'.

There are many ways of measuring the health of cells. You can measure currents and voltages in use, you can inject test currents, often pulsed, to deduce states of charge, capacity, internal resistance. A lot of battery management systems are processing this data backwards forwards and sideways.
If you interrogate a car and it reports some sort of % battery health, what precisely does this tell you?

[BertBert]

So here's the thing... The range of the Zoe seems to have fallen off a cliff with the temps below 5 degrees recently. Kind of 90 miles displayed on a full charge. It's one of the Zoes with a leased battery. I was planning to pay off the lease (should have done it ages ago - sigh). However I am pretty sure that the leased battery has a warranty of 80% of original life. I would need to dig out the docs to see if there is a definition of what that means.

Also I have no idea what would happen if they we decide that the warranty could be triggered - they surely wouldn't try to replace the pack surely?

How very interesting!

[OutInTheShed]

BertBert said:

So here's the thing... The range of the Zoe seems to have fallen off a cliff with the temps below 5 degrees recently. Kind of 90 miles displayed on a full charge. It's one of the Zoes with a leased battery. I was planning to pay off the lease (should have done it ages ago - sigh). However I am pretty sure that the leased battery has a warranty of 80% of original life. I would need to dig out the docs to see if there is a definition of what that means.

Also I have no idea what would happen if they we decide that the warranty could be triggered - they surely wouldn't try to replace the pack surely?

How very interesting!

It would make sense to be sure what you are signing up to with a warranty on a battery.

I expect the range estimate will improve in Spring.

[alabbasi]

A battery load test will tell you everything you need to know

[BertBert]

alabbasi said:

A battery load test will tell you everything you need to know

Thanks. How or where would I get that done please?

[alabbasi]

Most auto supplies places will have an electronic load tester but you can buy a cheap analoge one. It's simply a heating element that adds a load to the battery. If it quickly loses charge (say about 10 seconds), the battery is bad.

Here's one that looks exactly like the one I own: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AB-Tools-Toolzone-Battery...

[BertBert]

alabbasi said:

Most auto supplies places will have an electronic load tester but you can buy a cheap analoge one. It's simply a heating element that adds a load to the battery. If it quickly loses charge (say about 10 seconds), the battery is bad.

Here's one that looks exactly like the one I own: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AB-Tools-Toolzone-Battery...

Is that for a 12v battery rather than an EV traction battery??

[alabbasi]

Oh it's an electric vehicle! My apologies, Renault pulled out of the US market in the 80's so I'm not familiar with a Zoe.

Seems like there's an app called CanZE that can be installed on your phone and gather information from the OBD2 port. Here's a thread that discusses it: https://www.speakev.com/threads/renault-zoe-batter...

[BertBert]

That makes great reading thanks. But, makes me not want to bother with finding out the SOH as even if it's poor it won't get fixed by Renault by the looks of it. Mrs Bert is angling for a new EV anyway, so I'll just trade it in and move on. I think my suspicions are just confirmation bias anyway. I am a bit worried about the max range dropping so everything I see re-enforces that

[essayer]

It’s the 40kWh one I assume?
75% guarantee on the leased battery. Charge it to 100% then check SOH with CanZE

Edited by essayer on Thursday 1st December 22:22