EV system warning light. What may have cause it?

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mxp

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 23, 2010
Messages
767
Location
Fremont, CA
Hi Leafers,

After slightly over 1.5 mths of driving my car, today I experienced my first anomaly with my Leaf.

I had the EV system warning light come upon starting up the car. (Page 2-16 of the manual). It is the yellow car icon with an exclamation mark in the center of that icon.

Not sure if it is caused by the Blink if at all which is currently on fw version 1.7A.

The car had 80% charge originally from the last charging but the car itself had NOT been driven or started up in 2 days. Last night, it was plugged in, and timer charging commenced at its designated time. The timer for yesterday would charge up to 100%. This is the normal programming for our use.

Received a Blink SMS mesg at 6am that charging had suddenly stopped.

Started up the car and there was the warning icon. The SOC meter shows Full/All bars but the miles/range was showing 80 miles. We drove about 3 miles to drop off the kids at school and when we started it back up again, the warning light was gone.

Is there an easy way to tell what the EV system warning light indication was for besides going to a dealer to check the message?

Thanks!
 
SteveInSeattle said:
I've posted the same issue elsewhere. I never get this warning light on days that I have not charged.. only after charging with the Blink.

Thanks for your reply Steve. I just found your posting. Linked here for future reference...

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5238&p=121965#p121965

In my case, the Blink completed charging to 100% in 1.5 hrs according to Blink logs but something happened @ 6am...

Weird.

@trentr: Thanks for your reply and I feel relieved.
 
My EV system warning light was on this morning (the car is just over a month old / 1300 miles). The red TROUBLE light on my AV EVSE was lit solid (and the instruction manual is just about as useful for that problem type--basically just says to cycle power to it). When I started the car, the EV system warning and yellow master warning lights were on and SOC was only 25%, which was about what I pulled in with last night. I didn't actually attempt to drive to see if it worked because we were in a hurry and I had to come up with plan B vs. debug the car. I did unplug the charging cable and the TROUBLE light went off immediately and the EVSE looked normal.

I had a timer set so it did not start charging immediately, although it did appear normal when I plugged in when it engaged for a second and then went into timer mode as indicated by the dash lights.

I did not get any charging stopped messages, so I suspect it never even really started to charge. This is precisely the scenario I am worried about. Even if it's for a rather innocuous reason, if I go out to the car on a weekday morning (or even some weekend mornings) with only 25% charge, that's going to be a big problem! I'm quite disappointed with this glitch.

So we had to take the ICE this morning and when I got back I re-started the car and the warning light was gone. I plugged the EVSE back into the car and did an immediate charge. It's been charging for about an hour now and appears normal.

Based on what I've read, it sounds like perhaps an EVSE glitch is to blame and the car lit the warning light to indicate that type of problem. But I would be interested in knowing whether there are other possible causes people have seen. I may take the car into the dealer and have them see if any codes or anything were left behind.
 
I received a yellow "master caution" and the EV warning light in the middle of a drive. It went away after turning the car off, then on. From the service manual:

ELECTRIC VEHICLE (EV) SYSTEM WARNING LIGHT
The warning light will illuminate if there is a malfunction in the following systems:
• Traction motor and inverter system
• Charge port or on-board charger
• Li-ion battery system
• Cooling system
• Shift control system
• Emergency shut off system is activated.

If the warning light illuminates, contact a NISSAN certified LEAF dealer.
 
TonyWilliams said:
I received a yellow "master caution" and the EV warning light in the middle of a drive. It went away after turning the car off, then on.

So since the manual (which you quoted) as not really that helpful (and possibly simply wrong since it did not mention "possible EVSE error" which is what it appears the real-world causes of the light reported here are), let me ask you: did you take it to the dealer as the manual suggested (just to double check that there wasn't a problem with any of the systems mentioned in the manual)?
 
lpickup said:
TonyWilliams said:
I received a yellow "master caution" and the EV warning light in the middle of a drive. It went away after turning the car off, then on.

So since the manual (which you quoted) as not really that helpful (and possibly simply wrong since it did not mention "possible EVSE error" which is what it appears the real-world causes of the light reported here are), let me ask you: did you take it to the dealer as the manual suggested (just to double check that there wasn't a problem with any of the systems mentioned in the manual)?

It went out, I didn't smell any smoke, and I expected some glitches !

The last plane I flew, we called the "reset jet". Same crap.
 
My EV System warning light lit up after attempting to quick-charge at a Blink QC unit I've used a few times in the past. I've never had that happen, and the QC unit terminated the charge, reporting that an 'error' had occurred. I tried one more time, hoping it was a fluke, but it came back with the same error.

I could still drive the car with the light on. Went to the nearby Nissan dealership to start an L2 charge (needed it to get home) and ask them what was going on. The EV warning light was still lit, and I couldn't start the L2 charge up. The three blue dashboard lights wouldn't light up.

The service manual seems to have hundreds of conditions that can cause this light, from CAN bus errors to individual cell errors, depending on the DTC code.

I ended up leaving the car there, and they graciously got me a rental car. I'll let you know what they find out.
 
Got the car back from the dealer today. They said the car had gone into some sort of 'partial shutdown', where it disabled the charging because of the code, which did occur during the attempted Quick Charge. Everything appeared functional after that and he also attempted the Quick Charge, which worked with no issues.

Unfortunately, after picking up the car, the car was down one capacity bar. The 100% full GID reading before I dropped off the car was 209, so I knew it was close, so their QC and high-heat parking (Thanks, Nissan Dealer) pushed it over the edge, I'm sure.

Other than that, the dealer provided a nice rental car with no charge. Thankful for that.
 
trentr said:
no worries, happens all the time. it just means the charging was interrupted, that's all.
More specifically, it was interrupted while remaining plugged in. If you interrupt it by unplugging you don't get a light. If you interrupt power while plugged in (say by unplugging the portal EVSE from the wall first and the car second) you'll get the light. The light will stay on until you power off the car. To verify, power cycle the car and the light should go away.
 
GeekEV said:
trentr said:
no worries, happens all the time. it just means the charging was interrupted, that's all.
More specifically, it was interrupted while remaining plugged in. If you interrupt it by unplugging you don't get a light. If you interrupt power while plugged in (say by unplugging the portal EVSE from the wall first and the car second) you'll get the light. The light will stay on until you power off the car. To verify, power cycle the car and the light should go away.

I think my situation was a little different. It stopped charging very quickly while plugged in, then I had the light active. The light remained on through a couple power cycles. And, while the light was on, the car wouldn't accept an L2 charge.

I confirmed with the service tech that in my situation, there was no sequence I could have done to fix the situation - it was only servicable by the dealer.
 
I see this warning light pretty much every time I charge at work. We filed a ticket with Eaton, the manufacturer of these stations, but there is no resolution to date. I have to admit that it startled me a bit when I saw the warning light for the first time. Eaton supposedly inquired with Nissan, and we were told to power cycle the car to reset the indicator.
 
I'm going to piggy back off this thread instead of posting a new one. See searching does work =)


First off huge thank you to Dave in OLY for tweet troubleshooting last night. I was kinda freaking out.

Time line:
7pm
Drove home with 3-4 bars of juice left @30*F.
Garaged car, set the CC timer for the first time ever.
Hit the 100% override
Set Schneider EVSE to 8 hour delay
Plugged in vehicle

830pm
Wife comes home and comes upstairs, "do you smell an electric smell in the garage?" I ran down and checked the garage. I didn't really smell anything I could pin point and checked the car. The EV System Warning Light was flashing away. I checked owner's manual. Unplugged car, turned it on and drove around the block. It seemed fine.

Plugged it back in. The blue dashboard light illuminated, the circuit breakers popped (as normal), the car beeped and acted like it was happily charging.

I checked the EV System Warning Light and it's still flashing away.

Unplugged car and tweeted Dave.
Turned on car and took car to dealer with 12 miles left on the GOM and 2 bars of charge. Dealer power was out thanks to the snow storm. So they can't accept the car to do service, plug it in to charge, use any kind of diagnostics and it's probably a 3-4 wait still for power to get back on at the dealer. EV System Warning Light still flashing away happily on the dash. Stupid light...grrr.

So power cycling the car didn't resolve the issue. The EVSE plug looks fine and the pins on it and the charge port look fine.

Hopefully dealer can explain the situation. More importantly that they don't try to assess a fee for any actions (almost wrote charge but that could get confusing). That and get the thing indoors. I don't like it sitting out in 20* weather with almost no charge in the traction battery.

Ideas? Questions? Comments? Am I just freaking out (yes).
 
1. Pull the negative terminal off the 12v battery for a few minutes - that may work to reset things. Failing that - sometimes these things can take multiple power cycles to "clear".
2. Don't worry about being in the cold with 2 bars remaining - that's plenty.
 
ksnogas2112 said:
830pm
Wife comes home and comes upstairs, "do you smell an electric smell in the garage?"
That COULD just be the smell of the heater, but given that it happened at the same time as a fault, I suspect something has failed.
ksnogas2112 said:
Ideas? Questions? Comments? Am I just freaking out (yes).
I've just started using the climate control timers for the first time ever. I hope this is unrelated to your problem, but who knows?
 
Certainly the dealership doesn't know since they closed up shop without calling to let me know they closed. Found out by calling the Hyundai and then Chevy dealership down the street that are the same auto group. The VRU on the Chevy says 'closed due to inclement weather'. So assumption is that all 3 are closed. Would have been nice to get a phone call telling me that. <insert expletives>
 
I have performed diagnosis on this issue and concluded that it's due to a Blink restart during charging. The blink EVSE will reboot for some unknown reason while leaving the contactor closed, and then when the pilot signal from the EVSE goes away, the Leaf's OBC will report a EVSE fault to the VCM. This causes this warning light, but it is temporary and will automatically reset upon a drive cycle once the Blink is disconnected.

You can verify that this is indeed the case by going into the blink's "Settings" menu and selecting "Device Info". Observe the "System Uptime" figure which should be the elapsed time since the errant reboot occurred.

This seems to occur less often in the newer Blink firmware. All Blink EVSE's should have firmware 2.1 by now, if they don't, it's probably because your internet connectivity is bad (Blink WiFi problem) or you have a defective SD card in the Blink. Call Ecotality and tell them you are having this issue and would like your firmware upgraded.

In the meantime, use one of our upgraded units instead of the Blink if you have one. They will not cause this problem, and you'll have your intended charge each night instead of an unpleasant surprise in the morning!

-Phil
 
Phil,
If the blink comments were directed to me, I've got a Schneider device. And car's still in shop but at least they have power now to do the diagnostics. Why they haven't completed that after being open 2 hours is another question....sigh

<edit>
Wife called and said the light's not blinking now and they don't know what caused it.

Using CW (since it's working now) I could see that it took a charge and release a charge. It was at 4 bars/40 miles and now it's at 3 bars 26 miles. Wife said they were taking it for a test drive so that hopefully means they did that and had the climate control blowing and did it on the interstate. The only other reason to loose that much that fast is a problem.
 
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