By now most Leaf owners are aware of, and too many of us have experienced, the problems with the algorithms used to control the charging of the 12V accessory battery. I am referring of course to the fact that if you leave your car plugged in to an EVSE for a week or more you will often return to find an unresponsive vehicle that cannot be started due to a dead 12V battery, unless you have gone through some complicated work-arounds involving charge timer settings.
Does anyone else find it odd that such complicated tinkering as this is needed simply to enable us to start our Leafs after leaving them plugged in for week or more? Why can't Nissan program this logic into its sophisticated computer so the owner doesn't have to worry about such details? Why should the the 5-day timer get reset each time the charging timer activates, even if no actual charging is done? Should we just accept that, or ask why is this necessary? Fix it Nissan!
Better yet, why can't the Leaf just charge the 12V battery whenever it senses that it NEEDS charging, regardless of whether it is plugged in or not, or the state of the charging timer?
When I first heard a about these goofy limitations that have led many a Leaf owner to need to jump start their EVs (I have had to do this 3 times now), I thought surely it is a bug in the software that Nissan will fix soon. But no such fix has come and the problem persists. If anyone knows of any good reason why a simple software change cannot overcome these serious problems, please explain. And if there is such a reason, then I would urge Nissan to install the feature that someone on this board mentioned the EV-1 had: a button to manually initiate a jump-start off the main battery.
Does anyone else find it odd that such complicated tinkering as this is needed simply to enable us to start our Leafs after leaving them plugged in for week or more? Why can't Nissan program this logic into its sophisticated computer so the owner doesn't have to worry about such details? Why should the the 5-day timer get reset each time the charging timer activates, even if no actual charging is done? Should we just accept that, or ask why is this necessary? Fix it Nissan!
Better yet, why can't the Leaf just charge the 12V battery whenever it senses that it NEEDS charging, regardless of whether it is plugged in or not, or the state of the charging timer?
When I first heard a about these goofy limitations that have led many a Leaf owner to need to jump start their EVs (I have had to do this 3 times now), I thought surely it is a bug in the software that Nissan will fix soon. But no such fix has come and the problem persists. If anyone knows of any good reason why a simple software change cannot overcome these serious problems, please explain. And if there is such a reason, then I would urge Nissan to install the feature that someone on this board mentioned the EV-1 had: a button to manually initiate a jump-start off the main battery.