NTB-11-041 Telematics Connection Fix - dealer says no

[surfingslovak]

CarWings could really use some more attention from Nissan, but frankly I don't see much happening there.

It's an under-appreciated resource and the fact that Nissan shipped early US LEAFs with a major reporting error in place did not bode well. I think we can be glad that they fixed what they did. That said, for battery state of health, it might be best to simply output the number they transmit over the CAN bus anyway. That would make it infinitely easier and keep everyone honest. Most owners will not drive their LEAF to turtle, do recharge tests or try to calculate their battery capacity du jour through some other means. Hopefully, it will be as easy to get the SOH and diagnostic information for an EV as it is with laptops in the near future.

 

[edatoakrun]

The way to see the report of kWh use from your LEAF is by NOT USING ANY M/KWH REPORT AT ALL.

All you are doing by looking at the various m/kWh reports, and trying to re-calculate your LEAFs kWh use from them, is getting progressively less accurate reports of the original number from the CarWings report.

O.K. Thanks!

So you are saying that the kWh readings in CarWings are the basic data and mi/kWh are derived from them rather than the other way around? That sounds reasonable. But we still have the question of how accurate the kWh readings are...

And I believe the CW kWh use reports and all the m/kWh reports that use them, are almost surely inaccurate in my LEAF, since the battery and ambient temperature adjusted range of my LEAF from "100% to VLBW is very near to where it was in September of 2011, While the kWh use reports are down, as reported consistently from all sources, by ~15%.

Part of this increased m/kWh is probably from increased driver efficiency (some of which is as showing up in my CW regen numbers) and some part may be increased vehicle efficiency, in lower drive train and tire friction.

But it is just implausible, IMO that both of those factors together could explain the ~ 15% increase in my m/kWh.

And what appear to be similar increases in m/kWh ( and reductions in kwh use) from different "new" to "old" LEAFs, reported (but without the most accurate CW data) in several other recent comparative range tests (which should largely remove the driver efficiency variable form the test) seem to indicate this kWh report error is happening with many other LEAFs as well.

 

[ttweed]

The way to see the report of kWh use from your LEAF is by NOT USING ANY M/KWH REPORT AT ALL.

All you are doing by looking at the various m/kWh reports, and trying to re-calculate your LEAFs kWh use from them, is getting progressively less accurate reports of the original number from the CarWings report.

O.K. Thanks!

So you are saying that the kWh readings in CarWings are the basic data and mi/kWh are derived from them rather than the other way around? That sounds reasonable. But we still have the question of how accurate the kWh readings are...

And I believe the CW kWh use reports and all the m/kWh reports that use them, are almost surely inaccurate in my LEAF

I find all these statements to be as inscrutable and confusing as ever, ed. If ALL "the CW kWh use reports and all the m/kWh reports that use them, are almost surely inaccurate" then how can you then use them to justify your claims about battery degradation? It seems to me to be a case of GIGO, even if you have had the telematics update as you have.

I think I will just stick with the gross "real world" estimation of the useable range of our car as a tool to judge the state of degradation of the battery for now. It can still easily do 70 miles of mixed freeway and street driving after 2 years and almost 30K miles, and that's all I need to know at this point. When it was new, it would do about 80 under the same conditions. Since I haven't lost a capacity bar yet, estimating my current degradation at around 12% is close enough for me. Until our range drops to less than 50 miles or so, the car will continue to meet our needs. Hopefully, that will be years in the future, if the degradation curve is actually what Nissan claims (higher in the beginning, tapering off over time). I doubt our car will under-perform enough to become eligible for any warranty claim during the first 5 years or 60K miles, and I just don't see a need to worry about its performance in such detail until it becomes a problem.

Trying to be more accurate about estimating degradation than that is just making my head hurt, and I get little to no practical value out of the CW data, so I will just pass on doing this update until there is another reason to visit the dealer. It's not worth a special trip to me.

TT

 

[ttweed]

Trying to be more accurate about estimating degradation than that is just making my head hurt, and I get little to no practical value out of the CW data....
TT

You know what would really help resolve all the FUD we are experiencing over battery degradation? For Nissan to create a tab in Carwings for "Battery Health" which would give each owner complete and accurate information on a daily basis about the condition of their battery--overall pack capacity, SOC (beyond the gross "bar" data), even individual cell pair voltages, etc. Why are we jumping through hoops and inventing ways to measure this with aftermarket devices, or creating complex data analysis methods, doing road tests, etc? They have access to all the data from the car, and it would be a fairly simple programming job to collect and display it in Carwings for us somehow. That might actually make Carwings useful for me, and a lot of other folks who are wondering about their batteries, instead of giving us a bunch of bogus rankings about how you stack up in your driving efficiency against other drivers in your region, how many eco-trees you are creating, etc. We just got our annual battery checkup report from the dealer with 5-star grading in every category. That is a joke, as far as keeping owners informed.

I mentioned this on another thread at one time, posted it on the FB page, and wrote an email to Nissan CS, but just thought I would repeat it in case anyone at Nissan is listening.

TT

 

[gbarry42]

tl;dr: skip down to "punch line"

I finally had a try at this. Here's how it went down. I got the P3227 update last week. There are three updates in this package, one of them being for the Telematics. So that put me with the latest "TCU firmware" but not the Boot/Application firmware. I asked them if they could update the application firmware, but they said no, it's already updated, etc., just as we have found here.

Now, my angle was, they've done this before, so they might remember how this works, and certainly they have the necessary SD card to do the update. If they are up on this, great; and if they refused, well, I didn't want to get into the three weeks of conference calls starting with customer service and ending up with Carlos Ghosn, plus more trips to Oceanside, since CarWings wasn't all that valuable to me. I just thought it would be nice if this feature they put in the car actually worked.

The tech showed me the NTB (thanks to you guys for knowing which one) and nowhere could I find the part where you flash the app FW. So, I had to concede that if I couldn't find where it told them to do it, I couldn't ask them to do it. I told them someone (that's you, Dave) had done this before at this very dealer, but that didn't work. They offered me a copy of the NTB, but I was just going to ask Reg for the pdf he had. Then it occurred to me that it could have changed, so I asked them for a copy to take home and study. I wanted to know how and why, more than I wanted CarWings fixed.

And here's the punch line: It's now NTB-11-041b, and right there at the top of the page, in a box (See above, "Read It Too Fast"), it says: "The A/V control unit update has been removed"

End of story. I waited awhile before posting, so I could check and make sure...yup, I still get 7 miles per kWh, according to Carwings...so, nothing's been fixed despite their Knowing Everything.

 

[TomT]

I do have to wonder about this... A couple of years back or so I got the Telematics fix that had to be done via the SD card... This supposedly fixed the loss of communications bug and also the reporting bug... In my case it did correct the wildly optimist efficiency reporting in Carwings and my values have been reasonable ever since... I was told by the tech at the time that the Telematics unit could not be updated via the Consult III+, it had to be updated via the SD card behind the display screen...

I finally had a try at this. Here's how it went down. I got the P3227 update last week. There are three updates in this package, one of them being for the Telematics. So that put me with the latest "TCU firmware" but not the Boot/Application firmware.

 

[gbarry42]

Well, I'm not sure what you're wondering, but if it's whether Nissan might be clueless about source of the Carwings accuracy, I'm inclined to agree. As for the units, I'm pretty sure the TCU (with the SIM card in it) is behind the glove box. It's the thing you pull the fuse on if CarWings won't connect. The Clarion unit in the dash is able to read the TCU version and display it. But it doesn't take updates from the CAN bus. It has to be upgraded by booting it up with a particular SD card inserted. How much it gets involved in the CarWings [mis]information is anyone's guess.

 

[edatoakrun]

tl;dr: skip down to "punch line"

I finally had a try at this. Here's how it went down. I got the P3227 update last week. There are three updates in this package, one of them being for the Telematics...

And here's the punch line: It's now NTB-11-041b, and right there at the top of the page, in a box (See above, "Read It Too Fast"), it says: "The A/V control unit update has been removed"

End of story. I waited awhile before posting, so I could check and make sure...yup, I still get 7 miles per kWh, according to Carwings...so, nothing's been fixed despite their Knowing Everything.

Are you saying that the p3227 update will remove the NTB-11-041 update (which "corrects" the CarWings kWh use reports, ONLY in the sense that CarWings kWh use reports post-NTB-11-041 will match the kWh used in the dash and nav screen m/kWh displays) from LEAFs that already have had the NTB-11-041?

 

[TomT]

Yes it is, but apparently it can only be updated via the SD Card slot behind the display screen. Or so I was told and observed when mine was done...

As for the units, I'm pretty sure the TCU (with the SIM card in it) is behind the glove box.

 

[gbarry42]

Are you saying that the p3227 update will remove the NTB-11-041 update (which "corrects" the CarWings kWh use reports, ONLY in the sense that CarWings kWh use reports post-NTB-11-041 will match the kWh used in the dash and nav screen m/kWh displays) from LEAFs that already have had the NTB-11-041?

I'm saying that the "B" version of the NTB dropped the A/V unit update from the procedure. In more detail:

The original NTB11-041 called for two updates. One for the TCU (via CONSULT III) and one for the A/V unit (via an SD card).

The "B" version only updates the TCU.

I surmise that the original was mostly trying to fix the lost connection problem, and that they were kind of guessing, updating both units. Later, they decided that the A/V unit (audio/visual; that's the "screen" and the box behind it) had nothing to do with the problem. The firmware level is a little higher than the original replacement, but there's no way to know what they've fooled with.