Rapid SOH loss since purchase.

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kingjamez

Active member
Joined
Mar 5, 2017
Messages
26
Location
Fairfax, VA
I bought a used 2014 leaf a couple of weeks ago. I went to the dealer and used Leafspy to pick the car with the best battery. I found a 2014 that showed 92% SOH and was quite satisfied. I've since driven it about 600 miles and have been charging it at L1. Two days after buying it the SOH had dropped to 89%. A week later down to 86% and today it is at 85%.

The weather has been cold to mild here in D.C. and I've been driving the car very easily.

Did the used car dealer somehow defeat leafspy and sell me a car with a bad battery?
-Jim
 
kingjamez said:
Two days after buying it the SOH had dropped to 89%. A week later down to 86% and today it is at 85%.

Did the used car dealer somehow defeat leafspy and sell me a car with a bad battery?

Two red flags here, fast SOC drop off and used car dealer. When I bought my Leaf, it was reset in front of me by the seller as demonstration, from original 91% SOH. It quickly fell from 100% to 98 to 94 within a week and slowly reached original 91% few months later. The degradation curve became linear at around 89% 6 months later after hot summer. I am at 87% now, almost a year and 14K miles later.
 
kingjamez said:
I bought a used 2014 leaf a couple of weeks ago. I went to the dealer and used Leafspy to pick the car with the best battery. I found a 2014 that showed 92% SOH and was quite satisfied. I've since driven it about 600 miles and have been charging it at L1. Two days after buying it the SOH had dropped to 89%. A week later down to 86% and today it is at 85%.

The weather has been cold to mild here in D.C. and I've been driving the car very easily.

Did the used car dealer somehow defeat leafspy and sell me a car with a bad battery?
-Jim

ahr is what you should be looking at.
 
AH=56.17 and Hx=83.52. I didn't take a screen shot while at the dealer so I don't know what these were two weeks ago.

No bars dropped... Yet

Edit: I just looked back through my leafspy logs. When I bought it on the 8th of March leafspy reported 60.08 Ah. The the next day was 58.6, 5 days later: 57.16 then Today 56.17.

What is going on?
-Jim
 
Nissan puts their used cars on the CHAdeMO often which will artificially boost it for a period of time. Likely what happened here but that is quite a big drop. I think that's what happened to mine too but my drop was not nearly as large as yours.
 
After starting to use a lot of DC charging my SOH went from 86 to 88 within a week, now down to 87% with continued use of DC. I do not think fast charging is the culprit here.
 
kingjamez said:
AH=56.17 and Hx=83.52. I didn't take a screen shot while at the dealer so I don't know what these were two weeks ago.

No bars dropped... Yet

Edit: I just looked back through my leafspy logs. When I bought it on the 8th of March leafspy reported 60.08 Ah. The the next day was 58.6, 5 days later: 57.16 then Today 56.17.

What is going on?
-Jim

what is your current driving/charging patterns?

these numbers can be inflated a bit by simply doing some long drives with full charges 4-5 days in a row or a half dozen QCs over a week or less. The numbers you are posting are well within swings I have intentionally done
 
When driving it home from the dealer, I did a QC from ~40%->80% on the 60 mile trip home. Other than that, I've averaged about 20 miles a day on weekdays where I charge every other day and 40-50 miles on weekends. Most charging has been done at L1, with a couple of L2 charges.
I had one day that I did 150 miles via two QC's, but it was cold that day and the pack never was above 4 bars of temp.

Thanks for the help!

-Jim
 
Here is what my degradation chart looks like from reset to catching up with real degradation level:
PUenCec.png
 
DaveinOlyWA said:
what is your current driving/charging patterns?

these numbers can be inflated a bit by simply doing some long drives with full charges 4-5 days in a row or a half dozen QCs over a week or less. The numbers you are posting are well within swings I have intentionally done
Yep.

From Carfax and/or Autocheck, where did the car previously reside? How many miles are on it?
 
@antronX,
I'm confused. I thought a reset only confuses the bar graph and not the Ahr readings (presumably from LeafSpy ?)
 
kingjamez said:
Down to 56.0Ah on the drive home tonight. I'm in free fall it seems.
If your SOH is stable then I'd be somewhat optimistic that the Ahr will stabilize at a value that matches the SOH.

As an example, if a stable SOH is 80%, Ahr may level off at 64*0.8
 
SageBrush said:
@antronX,
I'm confused. I thought a reset only confuses the bar graph and not the Ahr readings (presumably from LeafSpy ?)
After battery stats data reset everything gets set to as if battery cells were brand new. So the data becomes: 66Ah, 100% SOH, 100% Hx regardless of charge state. Leafspy just displays what BMS is reporting after reset.
 
AntronX said:
SageBrush said:
@antronX,
I'm confused. I thought a reset only confuses the bar graph and not the Ahr readings (presumably from LeafSpy ?)
After battery stats data reset everything gets set to as if battery cells were brand new. So the data becomes: 66Ah, 100% SOH, 100% Hx regardless of charge state. Leafspy just displays what BMS is reporting after reset.
Ouch

So much for having an easy way to identify resets. Does the SOH and Ahr drop in tandem to their pre-reset values ?
 
SageBrush said:
So much for having an easy way to identify resets. Does the SOH and Ahr drop in tandem to their pre-reset values ?
Here is SOH (top) and Hx chart. They do appear to follow Ah curve.
VNn9R23.png

(sorry for messy chart)

Leafspy is not a solution to identify resets. It is good to take a more detailed view at the battery SOH instead of looking at battery bars on the dash. But with common sense it may be deduced that, for example, 2014 car that lived in hot climate and with 20K miles on the clock, will not have 96% SOH and is likely been tampered with. One thing did not get reset was L1 L2 L3 charge counters. That may be a clue that in absence of recent battery replacement, it is not likely that a car with 203 L3 and 1600 L1/L2 charges will have 96% SOH or 62Ah battery stats.

Edit: Here is Leafspy screenshots before and after reset:
B9Wt9hL.png
 
AntronX said:
kingjamez said:
Two days after buying it the SOH had dropped to 89%. A week later down to 86% and today it is at 85%.

Did the used car dealer somehow defeat leafspy and sell me a car with a bad battery?

Two red flags here, fast SOC drop off and used car dealer. When I bought my Leaf, it was reset in front of me by the seller as demonstration, from original 91% SOH.
Woah. Re: the reset, why? Did you ask for it? He/she wanted to show you that it could be done easily or to show you that the difference before and after a reset? Or, was it to show that the 91% SOH was likely accurate and that you could see 100% SOH is obviously wrong?

What did they reset it with? Nissan Consult III plus? Legit copy or something pirated? Something else?
 
cwerdna said:
Woah. Re: the reset, why?...

The owner had a rugged tablet looking handheld diagnostic computer that plugged in to diag port on the Leaf. Seller went through scanning and clearing any DTCs that it could find in front of me. We got to battery section and battery health data and before I realized what it was, the seller tapped on battery reset as if was another DTC clear dialog. I did not react in time to stop it. Luckily I pulled battery data before reset with my Leafspy and screen saved it. I forgot to take a picture of the diagnostic computer that was used. It did look fairly expensive. I could try to contact the seller again to ask what computer it was.
 
Wow, this is enlightening. I went into purchasing a leaf with the belief that Leafspy would tell me the real state of the battery pack. That appears to be false.

That's disappointing, I passed on a '15 to get my '14 when it appeared that the '14 had a better battery. It's fairly clear that the car I have is about to loose at least it's first bar when I thought I was getting a MUCH better battery.

Down to 55.75Ah as of this morning. It's interesting that the Ah/SOH/Hx keep dropping even when I haven't charged it. It's clear that the computer knows the actual state of the battery but is applying some sort of smoothing curve to the readings.

I wonder where my floor is, not looking like I'm going to hit it any time soon.

-Jim -a less enthusiastic Leaf owner.
 
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