Phoenix Range Test Results, September 15, 2012

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palmermd said:
edatoakrun said:
Where are the voltage levels at "100%", and at warning levels and stop for all the test LEAFs posted?


I don't think you understand what the test was about. Let me try and explain. The test was to see what a "normal" (i.e. not somebody who frequents this forum) Leaf driver would see. They plug the car in and charge it up. They drive it and have the DTE/GOM and some bars to see how far they can go. After a year they seem to be able to only go 75% as far (real distance to work and back, not DTE/GOM distance) as they could when they bought the car. This test shows that in fact the cars with a loss of at least one bar drove 70-85% of what it could when it was new. That is a 15-30% loss of range. That is beyond what Nissan suggested we would see after 5 years of ownership.

Plain and simple, that is what the test was about. You seem intent on figuring out why they lost the range, and that is great, but it is not what the test was about. In fact you, nor anyone else on this forum has enough information to truly determine why we are seeing this loss of range. Is it caused by heat damaging the battery? maybe/maybe not. Is it caused by an instrument error that is limiting our range? maybe/maybe not. Has an instrument error caused the pack to go out of range and thereby damaging the pack? maybe/maybe not. Is it a combination of all the above? None of us have the tools to get to the root cause. This has to be done by Nissan. Lets hope they will have some comment on this issue soon.

+1! Great explanation and post!
 
Nubo said:
Phil, I imagine you've had to look into this in some detail while readying LeafScan. Do you have any insight to what actions a driver might take to "help" the BMS along? Specifically I am wondering about frequency of 100% charges to present the pack with rebalancing opportunities? An occasional quick-charge?

Thanks for the post. Makes a lot of sense and I've probably been too dismissive of the Nissan's software claims. Easy to lose sight of the fact that a lot of data gathering and assumptions have been based on GID's which are after all a dynamically-generated abstraction and not a unit of measurement.
Unfortunately LEAFSCAN™ exclusively relies on data provided by the Leaf's systems. It cannot "bypass" the readings of the BMS (LBC) and perform it's own measurements. What we can do is use what metrics are provided to calculate our own numbers when we figure out what is going on. If I had easy access to a degraded car I could make some good measurements, but unfortunately/fortunately my own Leaf has not experienced any capacity loss.

I will try include the capability to reset the battery loss figures as Nissan did on some of the cars it tested in Arizona. This may help.

-Phil
 
Volusiano said:
For example, if you reach turtle all of a sudden without seeing LBW and VLBW first, then that's an obvious safety issue that Nissan has to concede and address. Or if the speedometer is insanely wrong, causing you to drive much faster than the speed limit, which constitute a safety hazard. Or if the odometer is insanely wrong, causing you to underestimate your trip, resulting in not being able to complete it before the battery juice runs out. But almost anything else probably does not require Nissan to guarantee instrument accuracy. They can simply say that they don't have to guarantee the accuracy of anything else that is not a safety related issue.
Right, and I'm not going to claim that I have extensive experience pursuing lemon law coverage. It's my understanding however that it does not have to be a safety issue. Take my ActiveE for example. It often fails to complete a charge, which is very annoying. If I don't notice it, I don't have the range to get to my destination or need to come up with contingency plans for charging.

I reported this problem to the dealer and to BMW, and although they been working on it and I'm hearing that there is a fix, my car still suffers from the issue. It spent nine weeks in the shop, we had to visit the dealer three times and broke down on the freeway as a consequence of a faulty battery sensor. I was told that the charging issue alone and the length spent at the dealer and in the technical service center in Oxnard would be sufficient to seek coverage under California lemon law.

I'm not sure if any of the issues we encountered in Phoenix would come close. Seeing how saintyohann has difficulty getting any traction, I have my own doubts about the viability of this approach. I just wanted to entertain the idea.
 
LEAFfan said:
palmermd said:
edatoakrun said:
Where are the voltage levels at "100%", and at warning levels and stop for all the test LEAFs posted?


I don't think you understand what the test was about. Let me try and explain. The test was to see what a "normal" (i.e. not somebody who frequents this forum) Leaf driver would see. They plug the car in and charge it up. They drive it and have the DTE/GOM and some bars to see how far they can go. After a year they seem to be able to only go 75% as far (real distance to work and back, not DTE/GOM distance) as they could when they bought the car. This test shows that in fact the cars with a loss of at least one bar drove 70-85% of what it could when it was new. That is a 15-30% loss of range. That is beyond what Nissan suggested we would see after 5 years of ownership.

Plain and simple, that is what the test was about. You seem intent on figuring out why they lost the range, and that is great, but it is not what the test was about. In fact you, nor anyone else on this forum has enough information to truly determine why we are seeing this loss of range. Is it caused by heat damaging the battery? maybe/maybe not. Is it caused by an instrument error that is limiting our range? maybe/maybe not. Has an instrument error caused the pack to go out of range and thereby damaging the pack? maybe/maybe not. Is it a combination of all the above? None of us have the tools to get to the root cause. This has to be done by Nissan. Lets hope they will have some comment on this issue soon.

+1! Great explanation and post!

Good post, but not what I thought the test was trying to prove.
1. Nissian stated that the batteries have not degraded but that the bar display was faulty.
2. The test was to show the bar display was not faulty, that when the display showed a degradtion than in real testing the range had in fact also degraded. In other words, that when the bar display showed only 11 bars at full charge, your range was also only "eleven" bars worth.
 
Ingineer said:
Unfortunately LEAFSCAN™ exclusively relies on data provided by the Leaf's systems. It cannot "bypass" the readings of the BMS (LBC) and perform it's own measurements. What we can do is use what metrics are provided to calculate our own numbers when we figure out what is going on. If I had easy access to a degraded car I could make some good measurements, but unfortunately/fortunately my own Leaf has not experienced any capacity loss...

-Phil

Phil,

I noticed the first capacity bar loss report from the Bay Area.

Would you be willing to check it out?

Or, if that one is unavailable, another 12 bar Bay area LEAF whose owner thought they had evidence of capacity/range loss?
 
edatoakrun said:
Ingineer said:
Unfortunately LEAFSCAN™ exclusively relies on data provided by the Leaf's systems. It cannot "bypass" the readings of the BMS (LBC) and perform it's own measurements. What we can do is use what metrics are provided to calculate our own numbers when we figure out what is going on. If I had easy access to a degraded car I could make some good measurements, but unfortunately/fortunately my own Leaf has not experienced any capacity loss...
I noticed the first capacity bar loss report from the Bay Area.

Would you be willing to check it out?

Or, if that one is unavailable, another 12 bar Bay area LEAF whose owner thought they had evidence of capacity/range loss?
Screw that - let's get Phil and LEAFSCAN to Arizona (I think Phil has a Consult, too) to run diagnostics on as many cars used in the test as possible.
 
edatoakrun said:
Phil,

I noticed the first capacity bar loss report from the Bay Area.

Would you be willing to check it out?

Or, if that one is unavailable, another 12 bar Bay area LEAF whose owner thought they had evidence of capacity/range loss?
Sure, have them contact me directly.

-Phil
 
Ingineer said:
edatoakrun said:
Phil,

I noticed the first capacity bar loss report from the Bay Area.

Would you be willing to check it out?

Or, if that one is unavailable, another 12 bar Bay area LEAF whose owner thought they had evidence of capacity/range loss?
Sure, have them contact me directly.

-Phil

Hear that? Someone in the Bay with battery anxiety should take up Phil on his offer.

I only actually have met a few LEAFers way up north, and none of them believe they've lost range yet.

And besides, I doubt I'll want to make that ~500 mile trip again, until that damn Vacaville DC...
 
TonyWilliams said:
MrIanB said:
What kind of planes? Pix please.

Ian B

205638_1010450992282_3723_n.jpg
O


Sweet. Thanks for the pix, my sister is a ticket/gate/operations employee for AA.

Keep safe,

Ian B
 
Ingineer said:
If I had easy access to a degraded car I could make some good measurements, but unfortunately/fortunately my own Leaf has not experienced any capacity loss.
My car is down 1 bar now and I'm not too far from you... It's not as bad as the AZ cars, but it's something... PM me if you want to hook up and check it out.
 
N952JL said:
Good post, but not what I thought the test was trying to prove.
1. Nissian stated that the batteries have not degraded but that the bar display was faulty.
2. The test was to show the bar display was not faulty, that when the display showed a degradtion than in real testing the range had in fact also degraded. In other words, that when the bar display showed only 11 bars at full charge, your range was also only "eleven" bars worth.
The test was to discover the truth of their statement, although I think that most of us went in thinking the fault instrument claim was bunk. We ended up finding that the instrumentation seems to be unreliable as reported, and that degradation is real, but not always as severe as we were led to believe by the Gid meter and the capacity bars. Of course, Nissan had confirmed some degradation after testing the Casa Grande 6. We're still left with degradation and no plan from Nissan to deal with it.
 
Volusiano said:
kolmstead said:
thankyouOB said:
i looked at the data.
the range does not seem all that bad for these cars, considering that they are supposed to be paradigms of troubled Leafs.

what do we conclude from this?

That for freeway driving, with A/C on and going no lower than LBW, the 4-bar car has maybe 45 miles of range.

-Karl
Is this 45 miles range a guess, or based on some calculation? (since the test was done with no AC and LBW data is not shared).

But your point is well taken, like others have made, that pure data like this gives people the wrong impression that the results don't seem that bad. In reality, AC and LBW are the 2 important factors that would have caused the real-life range to be shortened much more considerably.

If LBW had been recorded, I think it would be beneficial to share this data to at least show what the results are even worse than it looks.

I am Blue917. As a reference, I turtled at 72.5miles on the test. On my normal commute with AC, I get LBW at 50 miles driving to the same QC that was used in this test. (15 miles city, 37 miles highway, with some nominal elevation changes). On the test, I was LBW at 64miles (from memory) or so over a flat course. The flat course did skew the numbers a bit toward making the issue look better than it really is. Real driving conditions reduce the range considerably as already stated. My best guesstimate is I would turtle at 60 miles on my normal commute, based on the 8 miles left on the GOM at LBW. Hope this helps with your thoughts on this.
 
spooka said:
I am Blue917. As a reference, I turtled at 72.5miles on the test. On my normal commute with AC, I get LBW at 50 miles driving to the same QC that was used in this test. (15 miles city, 37 miles highway, with some nominal elevation changes). On the test, I was LBW at 64miles (from memory) or so over a flat course. The flat course did skew the numbers a bit toward making the issue look better than it really is. Real driving conditions reduce the range considerably as already stated. My best guesstimate is I would turtle at 60 miles on my normal commute, based on the 8 miles left on the GOM at LBW. Hope this helps with your thoughts on this.
Point taken, you are very likely correct. I was going to present you with a fairly long calculation until I realized that the total commute range would have been 60 miles, just like you said.

With that in mind, let me reiterate what many have said before: the GOM does not predict onset of turtle. A better way to calculate your range after LBW is to look at the percentages. From the test results, your Leaf achieved about 17 or 18% of its range after the low battery warning.

If you take the miles driven until LBW, and divide them by five, you will get the remaining true range. It's a fairly simple formula, and it assumes roughly comparable driving conditions.
1
 
edatoakrun said:
And since no one (apparently) tried to calculate the battery capacities of the test LEAFs, from any data source independent from the (erroneous) gid count, the actual gid error rate is now not calculable.

There is no real way I can see to verify this attempt at backwards analysis, other than to see how closely the unreported m/kWh report error rates from the other cars, match (or do not) the gid report error rates from the other test cars.

If consistent correlation is observed, we might be able calculate the actual available battery capacity, if we actually knew how many m/kWh these cars actually achieved, on the test.

But of course, if we actually knew the m/kWh, we would know the kWh capacity already...

Looks to me that if you want to know your LEAFs actual battery capacity, a meter or (accurate charge rate) and the charge efficiency, will be required.

edatoakrun said:
Alternate means of testing of the battery capacity, such as by measuring the charge accepted, might allow more accurate battery capacity results, from which standardized ranges at m/kWh use levels, could be calculated.

The problem with your entire drive to figure out battery capacity is that you are assuming we can measure it. The gids are inaccurate because the hall-effect measurement system is inaccurate. You cannot rely on wall energy put into the car because this is just what the BMS allows you to put into the battery. If there is any truth to Nissan's claim or faulty instrumentation then the BMS may also rely on the same instrumentation and therefore may be restricting the battery by mistake. I do not believe this is the whole story, but nonetheless it highlights the fact that unless we yank the packs and manually test each cell or module we will not know with any certainty the actual capacity and no amount of testing is going to reveal it, if the BMS is confused. You wouldn't even be able to prove the BMS was confused.

In short, what makes you think you can trust the m/kw or charge times or energy consumed? Any attempt to measure capacity could be just as flawed as you claim the range test to be.
 
Tony,
If you do decide to release more figures I suggest gathering the software versions on each Leaf if you have not done so. It would be interesting to see any correlations with the unreliable numbers it produces. For instance you said, I think, that the m/kw is all over the place. I wonder if there is a correlation with software revs?

Cool plane! Wish I was a pilot sometimes.
 
SierraQ said:
Tony,
If you do decide to release more figures I suggest gathering the software versions on each Leaf if you have not done so. It would be interesting to see any correlations with the unreliable numbers it produces. For instance you said, I think, that the m/kw is all over the place. I wonder if there is a correlation with software revs?

Cool plane! Wish I was a pilot sometimes.

I'm really just delaying the release of more data to jerk Ed's chain :twisted:

Ok, that's not true, but I've been too busy to complete everything. I've been getting ready for our Quick Charge Power display at National Plug In Day. So, it might be next week.

There's a few corrections to be made, and the usual sundry items to attend to.

That plane was a good one. Good avionics package, all glass panels, good power, 41,000 service ceiling, 85,000 pounds MGTOW. No auto-throttles, but FADEC engine controls. I flew that same model in western Africa, too. That pic was taken a while ago, in Buffalo, New York.
 
drees wrote:

There's only two things that might cause one car to turtle at 350V and another to turtle at 290V.

1. A software problem. No further explanation needed here.
2. At least one cell-pair with significantly lower capacity than the rest - one cell-pair hit the low-voltage limit and the BMS shut the party down. Should be easy to check with a Consult by taking this car down near turtle.
-----

To me, this could be the most exciting news from the Tempe test. If we do have one or two cell pairs failing, all it will take to demonstrate this is to run the car down to VLBW or better still, turtle, and have the dealer perform a cell pair voltage check. But it is crucial that the car not be charged before this is done. My experience has been that the first thing the dealer does with a low SOC car is charge it up. My car, which turtled on the way to the dealer in January, was up to 70% SOC before they did cpvc.

If we know the voltage at which a battery with all good cell pairs goes to turtle, then anyone with Gary's SOCmeter can run to turtle and check pack voltage. If it's significantly higher than normal, you have one or more bad cell pairs, which would be a warranty issue.

-Karl
 
kolmstead said:
To me, this could be the most exciting news from the Tempe test.
Agreed! Good stuff!
kolmstead said:
If we do have one or two cell pairs failing, all it will take to demonstrate this is to run the car down to VLBW or better still, turtle, and have the dealer perform a cell pair voltage check.
Perhaps you have never been to a Nissan dealer before... ;) (Sorry, but I presently am having difficulty getting a simple software update that they have in-hand.)
 
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