Plug In America LEAF Battery Survey

surfingslovak · Oct 30, 2012

Tom Saxton, the Vice-President of Plug In America, has put together a well-thought-out survey to help gauge how well Leaf owners are doing in terms of battery capacity and range. We have the data for about 14 cars so far, and it would be great if we could get past 50. The survey is very detailed, but only about 20 entries are mandatory. Please take a few minutes to complete it for the benefit of all.

Tom Saxton said:

LEAF Battery Survey Form

The purpose of this survey is to allow LEAF owners to share their experience with battery pack capacity and how it changes over time and distance driven. If you are a LEAF owner, please contribute your experience to the survey by filling in the information below. You are welcome to enter data again as you increase your time and distance.

Click to expand...

Click to open

mwalsh · Oct 30, 2012

surfingslovak said:
Tom Saxton, the Vice-President of Plug In America, has put together a well-thought-out survey to help gauge how well Leaf owners are doing in terms of battery capacity and range. We have the data for about 14 cars so far, and it would be great if we could get past 50. The survey is very detailed, but only about 20 entries are mandatory. Please take a few minutes to complete it for the benefit of all.

I'll be sure to do that a bit later. I still feel I'm ~10% off new @ 22k on the odo.

DaveinOlyWA · Oct 30, 2012

A lot of people have yet to take the survey. I wonder how steve's monitoring is going?

surfingslovak · Oct 30, 2012

mwalsh said:
I'll be sure to do that a bit later. I still feel I'm ~10% off new @ 22k on the odo.

Much appreciated!

DaveinOlyWA said:
I wonder how steve's monitoring is going?

Yes, me too. Steve's Leaf with its very high mileage is an interesting outlier. I wonder who this owner with significant range loss in Snoqualmie might be.

xtremeflyer · Oct 30, 2012

mwalsh said:
I'll be sure to do that a bit later. I still feel I'm ~10% off new @ 22k on the odo.

I'm at least 10% off new.. I drove home yesterday, conservative, got 5.0mi/kW on the dash, still arrived home 3 miles into VLBW after 76 mi RT.. I used to be able to do that at 4.2mi/kW and just hit LBW.

TaylorSFGuy · Oct 30, 2012

DaveinOlyWA said:
I wonder how steve's monitoring is going?

Yes, me too. Steve's Leaf with its very high mileage is an interesting outlier. I wonder who this owner with significant range loss in Snoqualmie might be.[/quote]

Dave has leant me his GID meter - this morning I was at 248 - higher than I was in the warmer weather. I am through 56K miles now - all bars showing.

LEAFer · Oct 30, 2012

Done

DesertDenizen · Oct 30, 2012

Done as well.

Herm · Oct 30, 2012

Stoaty said:
One more piece of evidence that charging to 100% doesn't appear to be a major factor affecting battery life (not that I am going to change my habits, though, since it may still make a couple percent difference per year).

Charging to a high voltage and leaving it there degrades the electrolyte, once enough of it degrades then your battery losses capacity from that point on. It all depends on how much of an excess Nissan allowed when they built the cells. It would be nice if the cells were refillable.

edatoakrun · Oct 30, 2012

edatoakrun said:
="spooka"]

edatoakrun said:

New reports of capacity bar loss slowed to a trickle after September, and none have been reported for 18 days to date.

http://mynissanleaf.com/wiki/index.php?title=Real_World_Battery_Capacity_Loss#four_bars" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As I have mentioned before, the rate of bar loss until next Spring will be a strong indicator of the relative contributions of actual capacity loss to "gauge error", in causing capacity bar loss. If the capacity bars were accurate (and the LEAF BMS does not adapt to temperature, limiting charge levels in hotter conditions) large numbers of new LEAFs should still be losing bars, albeit likely at a slower rate than during the Summer, when they may have actually been losing capacity at a more rapid rate.

IMO it is beginning to look like "gauge error", corresponding to battery/ambient temperatures, has very likely been a major, or even predominant, cause of LEAF capacity bar loss.

Click to expand...

If it is a gauge error, why aren't bars reappearing with cooler temps? Why would it only go one way?...

Maybe some will.

Or, maybe the design does not allow recovery of capacity bars, without the "reset" procedure applied to TickTock's LEAF.

="spooka"

...Could it be that the capacity levels have dropped below the "quick" 20% level of the degradation curve and have now leveled off for the slower death spiral toward that last 10%? These two factors could be in play: 1.The cooler temps and 2. A slower capacity loss with time because the packs are beyond the "fast" first 15% loss on the curve already.

Over 99% of Leafs sold in the American market have not yet reported their first bar loss, whatever proportion of battery capacity that bar is intended to, or does in fact, represent.

If capacity bars are actually accurate representations of battery capacity, a significant proportion of that 99% should already be close to that capacity level, and should lose their first bar before Spring.

We probably should expect bar losses to pick up with the seasonal ambient temperature rise next year in any case (IMO, likely due to erroneous kWh use reports, AKA "gauge error") unless Nissan comes up with a fix before then.

tomsax · Oct 30, 2012

surfingslovak said:
Tom Saxton, the Vice-President of Plug In America, has put together a well-thought-out survey to help gauge how well Leaf owners are doing in terms of battery capacity and range. We have the data for about 14 cars so far, and it would be great if we could get past 50. The survey is very detailed, but only about 20 entries are mandatory. Please take a few minutes to complete it for the benefit of all.

Thanks for spreading the word about the survey!

I was waiting a bit to make sure I had any wrinkles ironed out before posting to MNL, but I think it's in pretty good shape now and I'm hoping I'll get a lot of responses, enough to get a good picture of what's going on.

So, please, everyone submit your data. I want lots of LEAFs so I have a good cross-section of those that are still going strong as well as those that have lost range.

RegGuheert · Oct 30, 2012

tomsax said:
So, please, everyone submit your data.

Done.

Thanks for putting together this survey and the upcoming effort to process the data.

Here are some unsolicited suggestions for your survey:

- Please ask the condition of the car when purchased: New, used, demo, other.

- Please ask for odometer reading at delivery.

- Please ask how many times the car has been to VLBW. (Since you asked about LBW, Turtle and shutdown.)

- It might be good to ask lifetime average efficiency in 0.5 mile/kWh increments.

- I had problems with the survey returning to the top of the form frequently while filling it out using Safari on my iPad. This was little more than an annoyance until I tried to type a comment in the box at the bottom. I was forced to type the comment entirely blindly, review it, and then edit it blindly. I have no idea if this is a problem with the browser or your form, but it was somewhat challenging.

TonyWilliams · Oct 30, 2012

tomsax said:
So, please, everyone submit your data. I want lots of LEAFs so I have a good cross-section of those that are still going strong as well as those that have lost range.

Isn't virtually ANY LEAF in the PNW in great shape? Is there a single significant loss up there NOT attributed to high mileage?

Edit: Just noticed that it asks for "Perceived Range"... I have to cringe a bit, knowing that few... very few use the full range of the LEAF to make even a best guess at that. Even in Phoenix, if I were to ask folks what they thought the range was (who weren't savy on this forum), they generally would think "all is well".

DaveinOlyWA · Oct 30, 2012

TonyWilliams said:
tomsax said:

So, please, everyone submit your data. I want lots of LEAFs so I have a good cross-section of those that are still going strong as well as those that have lost range.

Click to expand...

Isn't virtually ANY LEAF in the PNW in great shape? Is there a single significant loss up there NOT attributed to high mileage?

Edit: Just noticed that it asks for "Perceived Range"... I have to cringe a bit, knowing that few... very few use the full range of the LEAF to make even a best guess at that. Even in Phoenix, if I were to ask folks what they thought the range was (who weren't savy on this forum), they generally would think "all is well".

have to agree with Tony. without a meter or a commute that pushes the range limits we only have the GOM to go by so that means you have range degradation if you at the top of the hill or you dont if you live at the bottom of the valley?

My SOC meter essentially gave me an extra 5 miles of range I didnt know I had. for those who dont have one, Nissan makes it scary. my answer was "have lost a little" because that is how batteries work. the initial loss maybe be very slow in the right climates, but its there...

palmermd · Oct 30, 2012

interesting how the cars built in 2010 do not seem to have as much trouble as cars built later. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues with more data.

surfingslovak · Oct 30, 2012

DaveinOlyWA said:
TonyWilliams said:

Just noticed that it asks for "Perceived Range"... I have to cringe a bit, knowing that few... very few use the full range of the LEAF to make even a best guess at that. Even in Phoenix, if I were to ask folks what they thought the range was (who weren't savy on this forum), they generally would think "all is well".

Click to expand...

have to agree with Tony. without a meter or a commute that pushes the range limits we only have the GOM to go by so that means you have range degradation if you at the top of the hill or you dont if you live at the bottom of the valley?

Yes, and if I remember correctly, Tom intended to only collect info on capacity bars and Gid count. I suggested early on that he asked owners if they noticed any change in range from new. Yes, this is a highly subjective assessment, which should be taken with a large grain of salt. However, in the absence of other data, we might be able to get an interesting insight or two into owner satisfaction and expectations. I would not take those statements literally, and I believe that this was not the intent when Tom agreed to include it in the survey.

There are already couple of interesting entries. We would expect that both of these climates are harsh on batteries:

These two seem to be doing better than expected, and you have to wonder how accurate the range perception was:

mwalsh · Oct 30, 2012

surfingslovak said:
Tom Saxton, the Vice-President of Plug In America, has put together a well-thought-out survey to help gauge how well Leaf owners are doing in terms of battery capacity and range. We have the data for about 14 cars so far, and it would be great if we could get past 50. The survey is very detailed, but only about 20 entries are mandatory. Please take a few minutes to complete it for the benefit of all.

Getting an error message when I go to submit on the Ownership field - nothing there for me to select.

surfingslovak · Oct 30, 2012

mwalsh said:
Getting an error message when I go to submit on the Ownership field - nothing there for me to select.

I'm seeing this SQL error on the page, which wasn't there before. I suspect that Tom is working on the backend, perhaps to incorporate some of the suggestions voiced upthread.

Code:

Warning: pg_query() [function.pg-query]: Query failed: ERROR: permission denied for relation ownership in /home/piaorg/public_html-restore/surveys/batteries/_db-postgreSQL.php on line 42

cwerdna · Oct 30, 2012

^^^
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/seliot/archive/2011/04/25/i-don-t-always-test-my-code-but-when-i-do-i-do-it-in-production.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

DaveinOlyWA · Oct 30, 2012

unfortunately there was not a lot of us that concerned with range when we got our LEAFs way back "in the beginning" it was more of "can i make it here or there?" and even TaylorSF said he did not start noticing loss of range until around 38,000 miles or so i think. now, he had range loss before that. we all do and but despite him driving fairly close to the range limit especially last winter, its not that easy to notice. and differences are easy to explain away

it was colder
it was windier
it was raining harder
etc.

what it took me a while to realize is how very small driving adjustments added up to significant change in range. I did a 90 mile trip the first Summer I had my LEAF by driving 55 mph. its the same trip that I had to stop and charge for 90 minutes in Auburn when i drove 60. now, did I need 90 minutes? who know? didnt have SOC meter back then.

would be nice if they could elaborate on their ideology behind the range question especially the 35,000 mile guy. anyone know who he is?

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