Hello Forum,
I recently bought a Bluetooth OBD scanner and installed Phev Watchdog. I have a 2020 Outlander Phev, but we bought it in May 2021, the car was used as a demo and had low mileage.
Today I connected for the first time to the car data using Phev Watchdog and I have tons of questions. The first one is to understand the state of health of the battery. I'm going to share here below the data I got from the battery condition page in the app and ask for your help to understand it - thanks in advance!
2023-01-17 19:50
74.5% [29.8Ah]
HI,
I recently got a 2020 outlander 4hs with 50000 miles on the clock, and like you got myself an ODB scanner and installed the watchdog app.
As a comparison I have 74% [34.9ah] and 11KWH which makes no sense when compared to your data.
I am finding that some of the data on the app does not seem correct and conflicts with itself.
Looking at the battery specification the fully charged voltage is 328v split over 80 cells with an optimal charge of 4.1v. When my battery is fully charged the watchdog app informs me that my cells range from 4.097 to 4.095v soon after charging with a voltage of 327.5v, it also clearly shows the BMS balancing the cells with slight variance constantly. Now I don't claim to be a scientist or an expert in the field but I would say that 0.5v below the the manufacturers specified charge voltage is not 74% battery condition, so i figured I would conduct an experiment to see if this played out on a real world drive and If I got 74% of the 34 mile range advertised.
To try and test this theory in the real world I took a drive in EV mode and had the car in ECO mode. It was 1am in the morning so the roads were quiet. The weather conditions were 16 degrees c and occasional drizzle and the road was damp/wet and a 10mph wind according to my weather station. I would approximate that 10 miles were done in a 60 limit and the rest split between 40 and 30. I used the demister a few times as it was raining and the lights were on with full beam on some of the time.
I drove a total of 34.1 miles (1hr and 8 mins) and by the time i returned home and the display was down to -- on the dash, the watchdog app was predicting I had a over a mile left of charge. I had a 9% regen and coasted 20%. I only scored 3.9 leaves so clearly I could do better :/
This demonstrated to me that the quoted range almost exactly the same as the mileage I had achieved in a non sterile environment with roundabouts, traffic lights and weather to deal with.
The battery estimates that it has been charged 1049 times since new so clearly the previous owner plugged it in most of the time as do I.
Since having the vehicle I did my normal use commuting (40miles) and running around within a 30 mile radius with several 50 mile journeys thrown in and compared the cost to the 1.6tdi Passat it replaced which cost £100 to fill from empty and got between 800 to 900 mile of a tank of diesel....900 being very conservative driving and coasting alot and pretty much an exception.
At 1150 miles the fuel light came on so I put petrol in which came to £49 (8 gallons) and I had also put in £45 in electricity. This equates to 144mpg of petrol. However if you substitute the cost of electricity and convert it to petrol it would come out at approx 88mpg. Impressive given that those miles were spent learning the vehicle.
If I do not go beyond 30 miles on a journey and plug it in when its about dead i would never need the ICE and it would cost about £1.60 to charge to full. When i calculate this as an MPG figure at todays cost of petrol it comes out at about 138 mpg. These numbers are strangely close to the manufacturers estimates....so in conclusion
I do not trust the watchdog app entirely, my battery seems to be holding up well and achieving what they said it would regardless of the figures, and aside from that, I am really enjoying driving the car and it smells great!
