EV RANGE DECREASE AFTER CERTAIN USAGE

[ufo]

Ok, I know this has been discussed previously. But I wanted to share my experience and also find out what your experiences are after 15,000.00 kms (14 months).
I have not had any issues at all with my PHEV but lately my EV range has fallen down to 45 km after full charge (I was getting 52 kms in first 10,000 kms) without any change in driving style, driving condition (A/C on-off) and route travelled, almost all of driving is to work and back which is 24 kms in total.
Question is; Is this normal reduction of main drive battery capacity due to usage and time and should be considered normal or is it too much loss and I should get it checked? I know main drive battery supposed to loose it is capacity over the time but how much is normal?

 

[jaapv]

Just have the battery capacity measured at each service.
Mine, after 50.000 Km, has not decreased noticeable. Actually, I get more km out of a charge than at the beginning, but that is probably due to learning how to get most out of the car over time.
The car is from December 2013 and has never been on a rapid charger.

 

[maby]

Mine is just a couple of hundred miles shy of its first service and I will ask them to measure the battery capacity. I don't think that the EV range has decreased significantly - it has always been difficult to get much more than 20 miles out of it and in the cold weather 15 was the norm. The best I've seen was 29.5 miles achieved with great difficulty.

P.S. At what point does it pop up the "Service me soon" warning? I was expecting it to have notified my by now and I'm reminded of another owner here who overshot by several thousand miles.

 

[jaapv]

It should have been set at delivery. IIRC about 2000 miles beforehand. Not that it is very dramatic to overshoot the service interval by a few thousand miles.

 

[gwatpe]

I have just clocked up 36000km in 8 months in my latest PHEV, and never had a fast charge, except the 30-50kW REGEN on a steep down hill, possibly 30 odd times now for a few minutes each time. We don't have the fast recharge socket here in OZ. Will need to get a personal MUT3 or equivalent device to get the battery data from the PHEV computer. MMC are not keen to supply service data to a customer in OZ.

PS: my 30000km was over by 4000km and was not an issue at my dealer. 5000km over was mentioned as an issue with fixed price service.

 

[anko]

Will need to get a personal MUT3 or equivalent device to get the battery data from the PHEV computer. MMC are not keen to supply service data to a customer in OZ.

Is that all you need? :mrgreen:

Step 1: Buy an OBDII WiFi dongle and hook it up to your car (I believe you have one already, gwatpe)
Step 2: Connect your laptop to the WiFi network created by the dongle
Step 3: Open a telnet session from your laptop to the dongle. On a MAC for instance you type the following command in a terminal session (all OBDII dongles I worked with had this IP address and port number):

telnet 192.168.0.10 35000

It may take a while, before the connection is established, but finally your screen should show:

Trying 192.168.0.10...
Connected to 192.168.0.10.
Escape character is '^]'.

Step 4: Type the stuff in underlined font (<enter> is the enter key). Stuff in italic font are responses you would expect:

ATZ<enter>
ATZ


ELM327 v2.1

>ATSP6<enter>
ATSP6
OK

>ATH1<enter>
ATH1
OK

>ATFCSH761<enter>
ATSH761
OK

>ATFCSD300000<enter>
ATFCSD300000
OK

>ATFCSM1<enter>
ATFCSM1
OK

>ATSH761<enter>
ATSH761
OK

>

So far, you have:

- initialised the OBDII adapter (remember talking to modems? :mrgreen: )
- selected canbus protocol # 6 (ISO 15765-4 CAN 11 bit ID, 500 kbaud)
- enabled display of headers in responses
- enabled flow control for communication with device with address number 761 (which happens to be the "Hey, I want to talk to you" address for BMU ECU)
- defined the flow control string (300000)
- and mode (1)
- and told the dongle that the next non-AT command is targeted to device with address number 761

Now enter the mode (12) and pid (01):

1201<enter>
2101
762 10 37 61 01 82 83 0F 8B
762 21 24 0F 88 03 0C 6E 52
762 22 03 4D 1C 01 99 00 00
762 23 00 00 00 01 00 01 30
762 24 0F 0F 01 54 00 CC 9C
762 25 FE 00 03 0F 88 86 8B
762 26 64 00 00 00 00 00 00
762 27 00 00 0F 8A 00 02 00

Now you have the stuff you need, as 762 is the "Hey, I am talking back at you" address of the BMU ECU.

Find what you have where I had 01 54. Convert this from hexadecimal to decimal (see below) and divide by 10. This will give you the max charge capacity, or battery health in Ah. (In this case only 34.0 Ah :evil: )
Find what you have where I had 00 CC. Convert this from hexadecimal to decimal (see below) and divide by 10. This will give you the current charge, or SOC in Ah.

Wanna know SOC in percentage? Take the 82 from the first row, convert to decimal, divide by 2 and then subtract 5 ( :roll: ). In this case the SOC is 60%.

And yes, I did sort that out all by myself :idea: And yes, it did take an awful lot of time and some money too :| .

Converting from hex to decimal for dummies guide

Replace each character in the hexadecimal string with a value, as follows
0=0, 1=1, 2=2, .... 9=9, A=10, B=11, C=12, D=13, E=14, F=15

Reading right to left, multiply the first value with 1, the second with 16, the third with 256 and the fourth with 4096. Than add everything you have together.

First example: BF8A =

B = 11 * 4096 = 45056
F = 15 * 256 = 3840
8 = 8 * 16 = 128
A = 10 * 1 = 10
Total = 49034

Second example: 0154 = 0 * 4096 + 1 * 256 + 5 * 16 + 4 * 1 = 340. Divided by then it gives 34.0, my lays battery health.

 

[Neverfuel]

I am totally in awe!

Great post Anko

Can we sticky this please Jaapv?

 

[anko]

I am totally in awe!

Great post Anko

Can we sticky this please Jaapv?

Thanks. I can use some encouragement. Let me start a new thread with a bit more generic setup, ok?

 

[Neverfuel]

Good idea - put it in technical. I haven't got the dongle yet, but I would never have figured out the data breakdown. Do you have a manual to refer to?

 

[gwatpe]

I do remember setting up modems when bulletin boards first started up in the mid 80's. I had thought we were at a higher level of com's now. All com's I work with presently I use XML and strings of csv data.

I have arduino experience and routinely program in VB, so I will look into a windows tablet and maybe give it a go as well. We build our own MUT3 device. "anko the man".

 

[ufo]

Wow, great information Anko. I'll try that.
Also going back to the original topic, I always put it on charge when I get back home doesn't matter what the charge level is (it is around 50% most of the time) and always standard charge (no fast charge). I wonder if charging everyday like this might have any contribution to my EV range decrease.
Yeah, Mitsubishi service will do battery check but they want to charge arm and a leg. :evil:

 

[gwatpe]

Have followed the procedure given by anko and here is my data in hex.

From the data, my PHEV battery capacity is 37.4Ah and the present amount is is 26.6Ah giving %SOC at 71%, so indicator reads 71-22=49%, and it shows about half full.

Was a bit of a fiddle getting the PHEV to spit out the data. Wanted to only send one line. Eventually though, result like anko's.

If I can maintain connection to the port, and communicate serially, I will be able to log data with a VB app. The data can then be graphed in real time. will need to automate the comms, with mouse clicks or button presses. Are we able to get some instructions re the structure of the data? battery voltage, possibly, and the battery amps[power] would be very useful, as there is presently no charging indicator.

all good so far, and potentially a user designed useful MUT type system looks possible.

 

[ufo]

A quick question Anko, where do you stick the USB stick on PHEV?

 

[gwatpe]

I may be able to help.

The communication is via the OBD2 port. I used a WiFi to OBD2 interface. I connected to this WiFi with my laptop. The WiFi network came up as available when the PHEV was powered ON. In effect, 2 networks were available from the PHEV.


The telnet app I had to enable within windows OS on the laptop. My android phone could possibly work as well instead of a laptop, but I have not tried it yet. Torque app should work, but I could not seem to get any data for the battery. possibly as Torque was not set up to find the BMU.

Even checking Ah capacity, a few times a year will be useful for all of us.

WiFi adapter was around $15, the rest is keystrokes on a laptop.

When we have the data structures identified as to what they mean, we can make a very useful tool.

 

[Neverfuel]

From the data, my PHEV battery capacity is 37.4Ah and the present amount is is 26.6Ah giving %SOC at 71%, so indicator reads 71-22=49%, and it shows about half full.

Hi Gwatpe,

I followed most of that but where did the 22 figure come from?

 

[anko]

From the data, my PHEV battery capacity is 37.4Ah and the present amount is is 26.6Ah giving %SOC at 71%, so indicator reads 71-22=49%, and it shows about half full.

Hi Gwatpe,

I followed most of that but where did the 22 figure come from?

I too think that should be 30%. Or perhaps a value somewhere between 26% and 30%. Either way, the value at which the last bar disappears. And this is not 22%.

 

[Neverfuel]

From the data, my PHEV battery capacity is 37.4Ah and the present amount is is 26.6Ah giving %SOC at 71%, so indicator reads 71-22=49%, and it shows about half full.

Hi Gwatpe,

I followed most of that but where did the 22 figure come from?

I too think that should be 30%. Or perhaps a value somewhere between 26% and 30%. Either way, the value at which the last bar disappears. And this is not 22%.

So based on Gwatpe's figure of 71% - this would equate to 41% above the base charge of 30% which is where the bars start on the SOC readout. There are 16 bars so each bar equates to 4.375% charge, therefore this would equate to 9 full bars on the readout, which sounds like what was observed. Otherwise, given the figure of 49% above base, 11 full bars would have been shown on the readout, which is nearer 3/4.

On another note, it is interesting to see that Anko's battery capacity is 37Ah and Gwatpe's is 37.4Ah. With a new battery supposed to be in the range of 40Ah (12,000Wh / 300V) this means that over the time they have had their cars, the batteries now have 92.5% and 93.5% of their original capacity respectively. Or in range terms a loss of 3.9km for Anko and 3.38km for Gwatpe from the 52km theoretical range figure.

It will be interesting to repeat this exercise in another year.

 

[anko]

On another note, it is interesting to see that Anko's battery capacity is 37Ah and Gwatpe's is 37.4Ah.

I wish it was. Mine is only 34.0 :evil:

According to Mitsu, it was only 38.7 (or something like that) upon delivery. Then again, the voltage is more than 300 volt (more like 320, or so). So, with 34.0 you still get to 10.9 kW. Bad, but not as bad as it may seem. Gwatpe would be at 11.97. Advantage of having good weather most of the time?

 

[jaapv]

It has been discussed extensively in the Dutch forum. 40 is a nominal valu, no car will ever show it Measure a car new from the factory and will be 38-39. Most depreciation will be in the first few thousand Km. Something around 37 is fine at this stage. As cars age it will drop slowly. How fast remains to be seen.

 

[maby]

It has been discussed extensively in the Dutch forum. 40 is a nominal valu, no car will ever show it Measure a car new from the factory and will be 38-39. Most depreciation will be in the first few thousand Km. Something around 37 is fine at this stage. As cars age it will drop slowly. How fast remains to be seen.

As the battery ages, does the car continue to stick to the use of the nominal 80% to 25% (give-or-take) of the real capacity, or does it start to use a larger fraction of the real capacity to compensate for the aging?