bdginmo

I only check this site periodically these days so I'm going to be late joining the discussion here. But 4.0 kWH after 2500 cycles on the battery is incredible. I got the transmission fluid changed at 125k and recently did the steering gear assembly bolt corrosion recall. The recall didn't go well. It totally screwed the steering gear assembly. The dealer ended up replacing the whole assembly at the tune of $2500 which they ate. I'll do the timing chain at 150k. I'm passing my vehicle down to my son at 130k miles. He had been charging it a lot in the fall, but with the colder weather and upon my advice he stopped over the winter. For his trips it's better to use the ICE since since he need cabin heat. The electric heater will suck the juice out of the HVB fast so charging in the winter isn't as advantageous. Anyway, I'm hoping this will get through college. I have my 2024 Ford Ranger on order. I wasn't opposed to another EV, but I really wanted a truck that would fit in the garage. The F150 won't fit in my garage so the Ranger it will be.

I'm up to 126,000 miles on my 2015. It is 8.5 years old now. Conditions were not ideal, but I did a test anyway. I made one extended stop and had the HVAC on. I got 4.3 kWh before it transitioned to hybrid mode. That is 77% of the usable EV mode capacity. I stopped keeping track of trips and total kWh usage at around 90,000 miles. At the time I had I had 4100 kWh discharged from the battery. I bet I'm over 5000 kWh now which means I'm close to if not exceeded 1000 charge-discharge cycles. The only big repair I had to do was only 1 month past my extended service plan warranty. The radiator sprang a leak. It was a $1600 repair. I had to get it repaired at an independent shop that had hybrid certified techs because the dealer was backed up for 3 months. I think the radiator itself was $800 and the labor was pretty intensive. I'm taking it into the dealer to get the transmission fluid changed this month. The manual says 150,000 miles but I like to do things early. Ya know...it's interesting...with all the paranoia about EVs and their batteries I'm more worried about 3.5L ecoboost on our Explorer. It has an internal water pump that can catastrophically fail with literally no warning that will destroy the engine. That is a $10K risk and the only way to mitigate it is to pay $4K to have the water pump replaced as a preventative step.

2015 MY and 104000 miles now. I did another test. 4.8 kWH to the switch hybrid mode. The temperature was 60F. My last test was right at about 1 year ago. It was also 4.8 kWH. So even though I'm down to 85% capacity I haven't seen it drop in a year. That is good news. 85% for a 7 year old vehicle with 104k miles isn't bad. I still like the car and we're charging it often multiple times per day now with the high gas prices.

I did perform another test. Conditions were 80-85F and sunny. I turned off the HVAC and had the moonroof open. I got 4.8 kWh from full to the switch to hybrid mode. I charged just before. It took 1:50 on 240v. So yeah I can confirm that I'm 86% of original capacity. It is slightly disappointing, but I'm certainly not losing sleep over it. I did do a lot of charge/discharge cycles recently and the vehicle is 6 years old now so that probably played a role. I still got 25 miles out of that test. I'll keep monitoring to see if degradation continues. I am still happy with the vehicle. I wouldn't hesitate to by another EV.

The temperature was around 60F, but it was cold the night before. Once it gets into the 70's I'll do the test again hopefully without having an extended stop mixed in.

So my last test I got 5.3 KwH out the battery. That was more than 6 months ago. I've seen a very noticeable change in battery capacity during this time. I'm estimating that I've ran 4070 KwH through the battery. My most recent test was 4.8 KwH. Testing conditions may not have been ideal and I did make one extended stop that can sometimes skew my results low, but I really don't think my HVB holds more than 5.0 KwH at the most now. My charge times have dropped to about 1:50 at 240v. I was getting 2:10 charge times. So both KwH and charge time drops suggests my capacity is about 85% of original. I'm not sure why I've seen such a dramatic drop over the last 6 months or so. I will say that I've been charging a lot lately and my car is now 6 years old with 90k miles.

I have a 2015 at 87k miles now. I estimate that I've ran 3600 KwH out of the battery. This is equivalent to about 480 discharge cycles. I believe my last test was 5.3 KwH to the switch to hybrid mode. I'm going to roughly estimate that my battery is close to 95% of its original capacity. I avoid charging in the summer or when the temperature is > 90F. My vehicle goes long periods of time with 0% charge. I'm pleased with how well the battery has held up given that my vehicle is over 5 years old and has had plenty electrons run through it. We have cheap electric rates here in St. Louis so I estimate that I've saved $2700 in fuel expenses relative to a standard Fusion. Just thought I'd pass along my report.

I'll ditto the high heat thing. Avoiding charging and using the HVB on hot summer days. At 65k miles I only have about 5% degradation. I pretty much stop charging altogether during the summer months.

I have 65k on my vehicle. I got 5.3 kwh on a full discharge today. The charge time was right at 2.0 hours. I have a little bit of degradation, but not bad at all. I don't charge during the summer. I will go months at a time without ever charging the vehicle during the warm season.

Ah...gotcha. That means you likely have significant degradation. A like new HVB would probably pull about 7.0 kwh from a 240v EVSE.

4.6 kwh at 100k isn't bad at all. I would leave it be.

If your trips are short and the temperatures are cool then 33-34 mpg isn't unexpected. My mpg is always low on the first 5-10 miles of a trip.

That's pretty cool that you got it working. I'm hoping this gets integrated into the Google ecosystem natively though.

Based on the reports we've received in the forum we think never charging it does no harm. There have been a couple of guys who reported that they bought fleet vehicles used that they knew had never been charged observed the HVB was like new. I personally go months at a time without charging mine and I've never had a problem. I have 58k miles on a 2015 and my HVB has lost maybe 5% of its original capacity.

The charging efficiency on 120v and 240v is about 72% and 82% respectively from what I was measuring.

Regarding the coolant heater faulting out...that happened with my 2015 as well. In my case the heater had to be replaced.

Agreed. Definitely get a new 12v battery. You're probably approaching 4 years of life on it so it's time to change it out anyway. I usually preemptively change the 12v battery at the 4 year mark on all my vehicles to avoid getting stranded.

I realize 5.6 kwh is considered to be the non-hybrid portion, but mine was only 5.5 kwh when I drove it off the lot. So yeah, you basically have a like-new HVB still. Much of the same for me. I get 5.3 or 5.4 kwh at 57,000 miles so I've seen very little degradation as well. Like you I baby the HVB at least in terms of temperature. I do have over 400 cycles on it though.

Yes. You should be able to get heat on EV. Definitely disconnect the 12v battery to force a reboot and see if that fixes it. I will tell you that I actually had the electric heater go out on my vehicle. It was replaced under warranty in my case.

When I say 0% SoC I'm referring to the value reported by the car in the My Ford Touch screen. I realize the actual SoC is more like 15%. My point is that I leave the "uncharged" for months on end.

I have 56,000 miles on my 2015. I did an HVB drawdown test today. I got 5.4 kwh and 28 miles so I've lost no more than 0.2 kwh of capacity. I have about 475 charge/discharge cycles on the battery. I'm very careful about temperature management of the HVB. I don't charge or use the HVB during the summer. The HVB stays at 0% SoC (as reported by the car) for at least 4 months out of the year during the summer. Because I use value charging my car is only at 100% SoC for about 5% of the time. My car is at 0% SoC about 65% of time. The remaining 30% of the time the car has a partial charge. My situation is consistent with the other reports that 1) 0% SoC does not harm the battery and 2) avoiding the use of the HVB in hot conditions mitigates the degradation.

1. I'm not aware of any. 2. Not really. The only thing to be mindful of is that highway driving drain the HVB faster. We believe discharge rate is one factor in battery longevity. 3. Be careful. The Kill-a-watt meters aren't really designed for a constant 12A draw. As it a result it may "burn it up". I've seen several reports of this happening. In fact, I had one at one point and it only lasted 3 months maybe. 3. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of this. It's pretty trivial to keep track of the gasoline portion of the cost. But, let me give you some tips on the EV portion. You already know about the 72% charge efficiency on 120v. But, what you might not know is that there are errors in the way the car reports the kwh usage. The car usually under reports the usage due to what I sometimes refer to as a phantom drain while parked. The issue is that while the car does a pretty good job of keeping track of the usage while on it doesn't know about these phantom drains while it's off. The phantom drain will result in the ICE running longer to bring the SoC back up to where it was when you first parked. The car subtracts off this amount of energy from the usage. For me I estimated this under reporting to be as much as 0.2 kwh for each one way 30 mile trip to/from work. So do some experiments and see what the phantom drain is like for your particular driving habits. 4. Preheating at 120v is going to be limited. 240v is way better. Most people who use the preheat feature don't do it in hopes of saving money. They do it because they hate the cold. 5. No comment. 6. No comment. 7. You're right. Installing a 240v EVSE probably won't have an ROI. But for what it's worth the charging efficiency jumps from about 72% on 120v to about 82% on 240v. I installed one mostly for the 240v preheating and because I wanted a subpanel in my garage anyway. Also, it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but resident electric service in the United States is 120v from hot-to-neutral. It's 240v from hot-to-hot.

It's pretty normal. Mine does this all the time. The temperature of the HVB affects how the car measures the remaining capacity.

I bet it will be really hard to keep the old one. I'd imagine it will be a condition of the recall that the new one is only handed out by turning in the old one. I never had a problem with mine.

Yeah, so I'm really not trying to stir the pot here, but CO2 and other multiatomic molecules (like H20) are definitely transparent to incoming shortwave photons and opaque to outgoing longwave photons. This is adequantely described by quantum electrodynamics via molecular vibration and although the QM explanation wasn't known until the mid 1900's laboratory experiments indicated the heat trapping behavior starting in the mid 1800's with Tyndall's famous experiment. But, even Fourier (of Fourier analysis fame) knew things weren't adding up and surmised in the early 1800's that the key to the puzzle of Earth's temperature was in the atmosphere's heat trapping behavior. Then came Arrhenius who between 1895 and 1905 actually quantified the warming behavior of CO2 and predicted that the Earth was going to warm because of humans. Callendar was also instrumental in the development of anthroprogenic global warming theory when he too calculated CO2's warming potential in 1938 and confirmed that humans would cause the Earth to warm starting within the next few decades. AGW theory is 200 years in the making. Also, it's a myth that scientists thought the Earth was going to cool in the 70's. The Earth is warming and humans are almost certainly the primary cause since 1960. The evidence supporting this claim is massive and spans multiple scientific disciplines.