GaslessInSeattle
Well-known member
- Joined
- May 6, 2011
- Messages
- 1,566
being able to choose a charger mode could prevent running the battery way down and hurting it. A couple of years back we got a freak ice/snow storm here that coated the highway with a porcelain finish of ice so slick cars were going from a standstill to sliding sideways spontaneously if the road was even a little sloped. It was an awful round of shuffle board on the highway. we were in our 2007 hybrid hylander for 11 hours going 1/4 of a mile an hour with no way off the highway (it was to be a 30 minute trip to the airport!). apparently the hybrid system is not designed for that, the motor never kicked in and charged the battery up for some reason and the battery level dropped to colors I've never seen. After a while various fault messages came up, demanding that we drive the car to the side of the road and turn it off. The next day, the codes came up again and the gas mileage dropped quite a bit, permanently! We took it in and got the "couldn't find a problem" run around, with "but we "refreshed" the software, if the code comes up again just ignore it". Toyota did not admit the battery could have been damaged... since the 2007 battery was one huge pack and not modular, we got cold feet and traded it in fearing a $10K premature pack replacement post warranty as well as crappy MPG's from there out. The 2011 we traded up for has a modular battery, which helped us feel more comfortable knowing a single module could be replaced if there was an issue with one. But recently we were doing some unusually slow driving in CA in heavy traffic, stopping with the AC on for long periods with the kids in the car and the same thing began happening again but fortunately we were able to get back up to speed before anything weird happened. I would very much have liked the ability to tell the car to charge the battery to protect it at that point. One would think the BMS would take care of all this but after our first experience, we would rather have piece of mind and be on the safe side as proving battery degradation and getting it "repaired" under warranty is dicey with more than just Nissan.