1-year Check

I've had my Miev for just about a year now (took delivery on 12/14/11) and noticed the wrench on my odometer appears everytime when I turn the car on and then it dissapears a few seconds later. Has anyone scheduled their first year service with their dealership, what exactly will be done by them, any cost estimate? Have had no issues with Miev thus far aside from having the CMU recall upgrade done 2 months ago.

They'll stick a plug into the OBD connector and leave the computer and car alone for half a day. Most likely it will completely discharge the drive battery and closely watch each and every cell in the process. Afterwards it'll recharge to the rim, again checking and balancing and recalibrating.

Afterwards it will print a nice report and probably tell the service people some things to do.

That is what happened when we bought our car. It was one and a half years old. I think rebalancing the batteries is a good thing to do once a year.

Congratulations - I think you are one of the first to after peterdambier to get to the 1st anniversary. Should keep this thread going to report on how its going for everyone after year one with the car.

From reading the maintenance schedule that came with the car, there isn't much that is required on the standard schedule. Check the batteries, rotate the tires, change the cabin filter and thats about it.

Don't let them sell you on the oil change!

peterdambier said:

They'll stick a plug into the OBD connector and leave the computer and car alone for half a day. Most likely it will completely discharge the drive battery and closely watch each and every cell in the process. Afterwards it'll recharge to the rim, again checking and balancing and recalibrating.

Afterwards it will print a nice report and probably tell the service people some things to do.

That is what happened when we bought our car. It was one and a half years old. I think rebalancing the batteries is a good thing to do once a year.

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As per the manual, doesn't running the battery down to two bars and then recharging fully recalibrate it?

Running the battery all the way down and then recharging it will give you a new figure for the capacity of the battery pack, along with the condition each of the 88 cells which make up the pack - You'll know how much capacity has been lost since it was new. Discharging it to 2 bars only recalibrates the 'fuel' gauge, but it doesn't tell you anything about the battery health or capacity

Don

I'm finding this checkup to be a moving target. Now at 13821 miles in 11 months, the wrench icon says I've got 13 months left till recommended service, and 16,200 miles to go. I seem to recall that figure moving both up and down over the past year. Any chance I misunderstood the manual and it's saying the service should happen AT 16,200 miles? (so simple, like the charging timer, it plum evaded me)...

To Don:

We all received a flyer stating running down to 1 or 2 bars and fully charging will obviate the need for the battery check stated in in the warranty manual. Are you disagreeing with the flyer? If something is amiss with the battery, would not one expect to see a "missing" bar (15 out of 16?) after a full charge? Bill Thompson.

Don said:

Running the battery all the way down and then recharging it will give you a new figure for the capacity of the battery pack, along with the condition each of the 88 cells which make up the pack - You'll know how much capacity has been lost since it was new. Discharging it to 2 bars only recalibrates the 'fuel' gauge, but it doesn't tell you anything about the battery health or capacity

Don

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But is that kind of a battery check really part of an annual checkup? I doubt MM would go looking for trouble when none is reported.

You cannot do much harm to a NiCd. They are even more good natured than LeadAcid - but you can easily damage a column of NiCds discharging them and reverse charging a weak cell in the middle. Same goes for LiPo. LiPo are even more of a mule than NiCd are.

But beware taming sudden overvoltage at the upper end and sudden reversing at the lower end and chemistry says for long life stay above 20% and below 80%. That is easily done for a cell but that is what a jongleur is doing in a circus with rotating disks on sticks when you do that for a column of them.

Discharging and charging is done in a controlled way by a computer and connected to mains so discharged state does not last long enough to cause trouble.

That cycle once in a year helps the turtle to keep track of the health of all those 88 LiPos, early diagnose trouble and know what it should show you on the fuel gauge. Maybe they should change from a turtle to a seal next time. Compares better sometimes at least. :mrgreen:

Dont overestimate the price for new batteries. They are developing batteries with 5 times the meat at one 5th the price right now and they hope to deliver in 5 years. Home solar power plants are already waiting for our recycled batteries. You may soon want to put your used LiPos into your house and disconnect the mains. In Europe we are going to pay some 33 cent per kWh soon. When you can easily get better batteries for your car that is an option.

BillThompsonMIEV said:

We all received a flyer stating running down to 1 or 2 bars and fully charging will obviate the need for the battery check stated in in the warranty manual. Are you disagreeing with the flyer? If something is amiss with the battery, would not one expect to see a "missing" bar (15 out of 16?) after a full charge? Bill Thompson.

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No - I'm not suggesting that anyone needs to pay the dealer to examine the battery sooner rather than later, especially if it isn't required for warranty purposes. But . . . . when owners eventually do begin to get them checked out, it will be really interesting (at least to me) to see what percentage of our battery capacity is still remaining after 10K, 20K or 30K miles. I'm hoping it's still 85 or 90% by that point

It's my understanding that each of the 16 bars on the fuel gauge represent 16th of the available capacity. If the battery was reduced to only 50% of what it was when new, you'd still see the same 16 bars, but each individual bar would only take you half as far . . . . I think.

I can hardly wait to see what owners report after they've had the car long enough to have it thoroughly 'gone over' by the magic machine at the dealership. For us, the only unanswered question remaining is how far the battery is going to take the car before it needs replacing. Will we get 50K, or 75 or even 100K and still have an acceptible range (50 miles)? The other dozen or so questions we had going into this revolutionary purchase have all been answered, and even better than we had hoped for . . . . this is one GREAT little car and far exceeds everything we expected, especially if it turns out the battery is still serviceable at 75K or so

Don

If I understand Mitsu correctly then we'll never see an i-MiEV needs a complete battery removal. We have got 88 cells and each one of them can break and needs replacing. A similar cell from China might cost 89 dollars. Hey, replacing them all is less than 8000 dollars. Spread that over the estimated 10 years that is less than 800 dollars per year and gets cheaper every year. How much does Renault charge for renting their batteries?

So what I expect is the first 7 years very few batteries will give up. All of them will be found during the yearly inspection and silently replaced, cells that is not the hole battery. After those 7 years cells will be replaced increasingly. That is something like 89 dollars per cell, probably more today but less every year plus the cost for getting them out and the new ones in.

peterdambier said:

That is something like 89 dollars per cell, probably more today but less every year plus the cost for getting them out and the new ones in.

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If it needs to be done at the dealership, I'm afraid that it might be cost prohibitive

The test to find the bad cell would be about an hour. Removing the battery pack, opening it up, replacing the bad cell and putting it all back together would probably be 3 or 4 more hours of work, so added to your $89 cell would be at least another $400 of labor - Replacing the pack 2 or 3 bad cells at a time would be very expensive

Hopefully 6 or 7 years from now, those 'classic' cells will be selling for $25 each, so replacing all 88 of them at once would be a mere $2500 or so - I could certainly live with that

Don

Going back to the wrench conversation. My car just started showing the wrench on startup, and my miles and time to service are now dashes (-----). Does that mean my car's due for it's annual check?

PV1 said:

Going back to the wrench conversation. My car just started showing the wrench on startup, and my miles and time to service are now dashes (-----). Does that mean my car's due for it's annual check?

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Yes, I'm seeing it on my car too. The car doesn't need any service unless you want them to look it over for you. I still need to take mine in for the recalls. Just got to find a day to take it in.

I was going to pick up my second I-Miev today. However, as I am buying, not leasing this one I told the dealer that before I was going to complete the deal the annual battery check must be done. The car was built in April 2012 and has been sitting on the lot (in Florida heat) with a fully charged battery pack for over a year. It has 30 miles on the odometer. So, with a car built 14 months ago with batteries that are older then that, I thought it was prudent to see where the batteries stand when the car is "new". I also thought it would be interesting to see what degradradation has occurred over time vs. cycles. The test takes about 8 hours so I won't know what the report is until tomorrow and hopefully I will have my second I-Miev then. I'll report the results here---I might be the first to have the annual check before delivery!

siai47 said:

---I might be the first to have the annual check before delivery!

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Thanks, I look forward to your results. Though my new car only sat under leaden chilly skies for most of it's year in stasis, I forgot to negotiate in this service before accepting Mr. Bean! No perceptible penalties yet...

OK---the car is delivered and the one year battery check was done for free. The result was 47.6 AH of battery capacity. This is a car with 14 months since build, sitting in Florida with a fully charged pack for 10 months. The car had 30 miles on the odometer when checked. The Technician told me that this was pretty close to the numbers he remembered seeing when they sold a couple I-Miev's last year. He said he never has seen a number at 50 AH and thought the highest was a little over 48. He also told me that they would have done the check anyway before delivery as Mitsubishi is requiring that they do it as part of the pre-delivery process. At least that's what he said.

I just had my one year battery check and warranty recall work done. The dealer charged me $49.95 for the battery test and said it was fine. They did not give me any documentation. I asked to speak with the mechanic and he said the test said the capacity of my battery came to 46.6 and that the most it could be was 48. He told me that the next battery test will be in two years.

Doing the math that would mean i have lost 3% of my battery capacity in one year. My car has 6,000 miles on it.

Dan

I'll be interested to see where mine sits. I scheduled the service today for July 13. They said it would cost about $50, so I guess they're doing a battery check as well. Service should be faster since the battery will be close to empty when I get there. Not a real issue anyway, since my appointment is early, and they're giving me a loaner i for the day. Great service!

They're also performing the brake recall. What differences are there with the new pump, besides it being quieter?

Just got mine back from service - just the two recalls. I didn't have anything else done to it. I don't see the point in the battery check - got enough things to worry about whether I've lost some capacity. Capacity Reduction happens - just like death and taxes. I just know that I can still do what I did last year, today. I find I still can get to Buffalo, NY from Niagara on the Lake with 5 bars off the power meter with careful driving and the EV Gods smiling down upon me. Have a harder time getting home with 4 bars remaining, mostly its 3 bars but that could be due to a multitude of factors like giving less of a care of how I'm driving and having more fun with it since I know I'm being as ecological in my commute as I possibly can at this point in time.

The new pump is a lot quieter than the old one - I like that. No more groaning noises coming from the boot anymore! Poor MMC, they've had a tough time with some of their suppliers.

The Clipper Creek update didn't seem to do anything different, not that I've noticed at least.