New 2013, sad battery???

I just sold my 2012 and got a 2013. My wife already has a 2013. I noticed immediately after purchase that, according to Leaf Spy, the battery in the new one was nowhere near as healthy as the one in my wife's 6-month-old 2013, and was actually slightly worse SOH & AHr than the 2012 I'd just sold! Here's the screenshot:


For comparison, my wife's 6-month-old 2013:


(Sorry the graphs are at different scales. I must have bumped it.)

What's the deal here? Did I get a horrible battery, or is it possibly not doing well because the dealer hadn't treated it well (high SOC and lots of short drives), and it'll improve as I treat it a little better?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Tyrel

I just checked the label on this car -- it was built in MAY! It's actually older than my wife's. Ugh.

FWIW, I took delivery on Dec 4, 2013 and got Leap Spy Pro Dec 24, my first checks were 261 GID, SOC 96.06, Ahr 61.08, Hx 93.96. I just charged to 100% and it now shows 273 GID, SOC 97.2, Ahr 63.02 Hx 96.87. All of those are new highs, I am hoping they all continue to go up for a while.

I guess the biggest question is: Will it recover over time, or is it permanently damaged from sitting at high SOC at the dealer for half a year? If it's permanent, then I need to figure out of there's something the dealer can do for me to compensate.

My wife's car came straight off the truck so it didn't have a chance for the dealer to hurt it.

There's a surprising number of "old" MY13's still in inventory, so buyer beware.

give it a few cycles, run it down to VLB and the recharge to a 100% say 4 to 5 times, at that point it should start trending up wards if it starts down wards demand a new battery or a new vehicle.

And you traded a 2012 for a 2013 WHY :?:

Stanton said:

And you traded a 2012 for a 2013 WHY :?:

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Primarily because it substantially lowered my payments -- I was robbed on the first one. Secondarily because it was very annoying to switch back and forth between driving my wife's 2013 and my 2012 (the buttons are in different places and such). And third, because the battery on my 2012 had never been very happy.

Don't be too concerned. Several of us with May built 2013 LEAFs have noticed this issue and there is a thread about the topic.

http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=13776" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

To summarize, we've determined that even though some 2013s show low Ahr and health readings on the LeafSpy app, the battery packs appear to have the full capacity of any other new LEAF pack. We have done range testing and we have measured the power required to recharge the cars from empty ("turtle") and have found that the cars have the full expected range capability and the power required to recharge back to full charge was as expected for a new pack.

Another characteristic that we found was that as we depleted the charge on range tests down below VLBW, the Gid readings behaved as if the last few Gids contained vastly more capacity than a Gid normally contains. That is to say, we were able to drive significantly more miles than expected after the car appeared to have only 10 Gids remaining. (I'm talking only a few miles, here, but it was highly unusual.) The last few Gids depleted very slowly between a reading of 10 Gids and about 5 Gids, when "turtle" appeared and the car shut down shortly after. So the car behaves as if Nissan has stowed more of the energy of the pack between VLBW and turtle. Not a reassuring place to stow it, since it requires that you drive the car further below the routine warnings in order to get the full range!

Nobody has been able to adequately explain either this, or the spuriously low Ahr readings, except to say that it could be the result of an unbalanced pack, and that once a full discharge and recharge has taken place, the car's BMS should reset itself to learn the pack better. But if that were so, we should have seen these two peculiarities disappear over time, and we haven't. The packs still behave the same way.

After my own testing and some encouraging parallel reporting from stjohnh, I stopped worrying about my pack's apparent low readings on the LeafSpy. I do agree with others that over the first few weeks and with some runs down to LBW or VLBW and a couple of recharges to 100%, you should see a rise in the numbers, but they probably won't rise as high as your 2012 car's readings.

It's also worth mentioning that I've noticed that when I do a lot of driving over consecutive days and I do consecutive 100% charges, my Ahr and health readings rebound by as much as 1.5 Ahr and 3.8 Hx.

I first thought that we'd discovered consistent characteristics of all new 2013 LEAF packs made in the US after May, but recent reports from folks like daveinolywa show that some newer 2013s give higher readings, more like a new 2012 LEAF would. It's still puzzling...

Boomer23 said:

Don't be too concerned. Several of us with May built 2013 LEAFs have noticed this issue and there is a thread about the topic.

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Thanks. I will add my info to that thread. It's hard not to be concerned, though, when the LBW happens a lot sooner than you're expecting.

I'll try deep cycling for a few days and see what happens. My dealer is aware of Leaf Spy and aware of my findings thus far with this vehicle.

Some thoughts:

Interesting how you've got one cell-pair that's a bit low compared to the others.

It would also be interesting to run each car to both LBW and VLBW and grab screenshots for each...

I think some others have noted that a QC from LBW or so to 80% can help bump up the numbers, too. But like the others have said - on these cars it simply appears that there is more energy than expected hiding below VLBW, specifically and the pack itself is otherwise fine.

drees said:

Some thoughts:

.... But like the others have said - on these cars it simply appears that there is more energy than expected hiding below VLBW, specifically and the pack itself is otherwise fine.

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I have only had mine to VLBW once and went 9.8 miles at an average speed of about 40mph and never hit turtle, Leaf Spy showed 7 GID remaining when I parked at home. My GIDs, Ahr, and Hx have all been going up since.

biggsy said:

I have only had mine to VLBW once and went 9.8 miles at an average speed of about 40mph and never hit turtle, Leaf Spy showed 7 GID remaining when I parked at home. My GIDs, Ahr, and Hx have all been going up since.

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Interesting. I just drove it down to 21 GIDs -- I got VLBW about 1.3 miles before home. My trip used 17.5 kWh from 100% to 7% on the dash.

Just before the car hit VLBW, it said I had about 8 miles left on the GOM. But Leaf Spy says I have 1.5 miles to reserve (which I assume is turtle?). So it is a little confusing.

I continued driving it up and down my road for the last hour. I got it to turtle. Yes, it took an hour to get to turtle from VLBW. I went 14 miles after VLBW until turtle -- which is about 12 miles AFTER Leaf Spy said I had "0.0 to rsrv". I ended up at 5 GIDs.

In total, I went 68.2 miles at 3.2 mi/kWh, so I have a usable 21.3 kWh. I believe this corresponds to how much should be usable, so perhaps the problem is just that the battery is calibrated wrong or something... ?

Computerizer said:

I continued driving it up and down my road for the last hour. I got it to turtle. Yes, it took an hour to get to turtle from VLBW. I went 14 miles after VLBW until turtle -- which is about 12 miles AFTER Leaf Spy said I had "0.0 to rsrv". I ended up at 5 GIDs.

In total, I went 68.2 miles at 3.2 mi/kWh, so I have a usable 21.3 kWh. I believe this corresponds to how much should be usable, so perhaps the problem is just that the battery is calibrated wrong or something... ?

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The reserve on LeafSpy is user-settable.

And...you have just verified our contention that your pack is A-OK and you are another data point for the May build 2013s. Congrats.

Now, try not to turtle too often. I've been chastised for torturing my pack that way, so mine had only been to turtle twice.

Boomer23 said:

The reserve on LeafSpy is user-settable.

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Oh! I see. I assumed it was the amount until Turtle. I see now that I had it set to 5% SOC. Since Leaf Spy said 0.4 kWh remained when I hit turtle, I'll set it to 0.5 kWh (which is the lowest it allows). Thanks for pointing that out. However I'll have to remember to change it whenever I'm using for my wife's LEAF.

Boomer23 said:

Now, try not to turtle too often. I've been chastised for torturing my pack that way, so mine had only been to turtle twice.

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I will never intentionally turtle again.

Computerizer said:

I just checked the label on this car -- it was built in MAY! It's actually older than my wife's. Ugh.

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Weird!

My '13 Leaf SV that was leased at end of July 2013 had a build date sticker of 6/2013.

This is a copy of a post I just made on the 2013 battery degradation thread. I am reposting for the benefit of those that don't want to read the other thread, as its getting long the the following is a summary:

TIPS FOR DRIVING BELOW VLBW: (only pertains to 2013 Leafs w capacities 58-62)

I have two 2013 Leafs, both May built, both normal range and capacities between about 59-61. Both w about 7000 miles on them, both turtled 3x each. I drive at least once weekly an 82 mile round trip, frequently w a few miles extra for short side trips. I drive below VLBW at least once weekly, and lose the last fuel bar about 1x each week.

The best way I have found to avoid turtle in these cases is to monitor the LeafSpy SOC down to losing the last fuel bar, and when the last fuel bar goes, monitor the lowest cell voltage. The way I drive (4.0-4.5 mi/kwh) I use the following chart: (all SOC are LeafSpy NOT dash SOC)

Dist to turtle= SOC-3miles (at about 4-4.5mi/kwh) works down to 11% SOC

LBW=23 miles to turtle, SOC=26%
VLBW=13 miles, SOC=16.5%
Last Fuel Bar disappears= 7 mile, SOC=11%, Lowest Cell Voltage=3.57

Lowest Cell Volts (car stopped for about 10 sec).
3.53=6mi to turtle
3.43=5mi to turtle
3.34=3mi
3.23=2mi
3.14=1mi
3.10=0.5miles
3.00=turtle

NOTES:The voltages are highly dependent on the load. To use the voltage chart you will need to stop the car for a few seconds to read the voltage, if you read the volts during driving, the miles left will be very inaccurate. The miles to turtle for the volts chart is for driving about 35mph. Turtle will occur at 3.00 volts, NO MATTER WHAT. SO, If you go 65mph, the battery is loaded and so miles to turtle will be MUCH less than the volt chart shown above. If you hit turtle, remember that if you turn off car you cannot restart it until battery is charged back to about 17%.

As Boomer pointed out, there is nothing wrong with the battery, Nissan has just programmed the GIDs, SOC, etc differently. They are not "wrong" just different. The problem is NOT the battery, but that the dedicated gurus on this board that have developed LeafSpy, DD, etc have not had enough information to make their instruments match the readings of the 2011 and 2012 Leafs. I strongly suggest that those with 2013 Leafs NOT use GIDs at all, way too much confusion.

Also, it is very helpful for an owner to do a range test, driving to turtle (not just near turtle) at least once, both to confirm the battery is ok and to feel comfortable driving below VLBW.

Thank you for this thread. I'm in almost exactly the same boat. It is reassuring that my battery is not as lame as it looks from the leaf spy app.

Computerizer said:

Just before the car hit VLBW, it said I had about 8 miles left on the GOM. But Leaf Spy says I have 1.5 miles to reserve (which I assume is turtle?). So it is a little confusing.

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Seems odd. I usually get LBW about 8 miles and VLBW as GOM goes less than 3 miles to "---". (2011 model year)