My wife said the HVB discharged 3x in the 3 months since I last posted. 2 of these happened last week in back-to-back days. It's happening infrequently enough that any troubleshooting efforts would be worthless I think. I wouldn't be concerned if I knew for sure this didn't have a negative impact on the life of the HVB.

 

Anyone have any updates on this? My 08 FEH can't hardly hold a charge overnight anymore. I haven't taken it in yet as I'm afraid of the costs involved.

 

I'm sorry.. I thought I chimed in on this.

Excessive and pervasive (all cells affected) self-discharge is the classic failure mode for the Sanyo cells used in the FEH pack. This is especially true in hotter climates.

Your battery is 100% bad. No question about it. My 05 does the same thing, but I periodically boost it with the on-board HV jump starter... that they removed from the 08+ models.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Well that certainly sounds like horrible news.


MPG Over time (10 years) - Note: We moved in Nov 2010 and commute changed to much more highway

So here is my MPG over time graph. I just assumed the car loses MPG over time, but this does seem excessive. If the battery is going bad, it has slowly been doing it over time perhaps?

If the battery pack truly is bad, is there any economical reason to replace it? Can I get one out of a junkyard car and have someone install it?

Will the car just continue to lose 1-2 MPG per year and be driveable? If this is the case then I may as well run it into the ground. We only have about 113K after 10 years. New brakes, steering column and battery have all been put in in the last year. Also, a new complete A/C system ($1300) was put in in June 2016 (with a 3 year warranty).

Thoughts?

 

I get HV battery discharges to 20%-30% overnight occasionally, not often enough to troubleshoot. And the regen braking has decreased over time, probably also indicating a degrading battery.

I plot my mpg at fuelly.com and my plot over the past ten years shows a similar decrease to yours. I attributed it to needing services like sparkplug and fuel filter replacements that aren't due until 100k miles (I'm at 90k).

 

I guess I should edit above. I did do the spark plugs and had the valve cover gasket replaced in Jan 2017 (right at 100K).

I guess it is good to hear your car plot is similar.

Should the fuel filter be replaced. I dont remember seeing that in the normal maintenance schedule.
- Edit: Oops, I guess I missed the fuel filter at 100k. Any aprox cost for replacement?