Hell all

I have a 07 hchII with 14,500 miles. And I love my car.
My concern is the other day 101 degrees, and doing a lot on parking lot driving. My battery went from full bars to 1 bar in about 45 sec. Car went into forced recharge, it ran rough at stop signs, like not running on all cylinders. When it got to 55 mph all seemed smooth as usual. It only took a few minutes to recharge it self. Boy without any assist there is noooooo power.

Today with the a/c on and 95 degrees it seems to drain the battery fast again, this time I was on the road so I was able to get it up quickly.

Should I be concerned or is this just how it is with a/c, high temps, and stop and go traffic.

I have the car only 8 months so this is the first hot season with it.
It was just a little bit alarming to see the battery go down so quickly

look forwards to hearing from you all
Brian

 

That is a battery recalibration. There are some of us that it happens to regulary, and others who never seem to experience this. It happens to me once every 2-3 weeks. In my experience, temperature doesn't matter--it has happend in freezing temps as well as 90+ degree temps.

The one place I've never experienced recalibration is in mountain driving, and that is the place where I would expect it most since my SoC looks like a yo-yo in the mountains.

I haven't read anything here regarding a possible cause or solution to this. I'm sure that if I brought it to the dealer, they would not be able to reproduce it, and I haven't managed to catch it on video yet. I will probably ask them to reflash the ECU when they do the steering wheel recall and see if that helps any.

 

Kristian:

As long as it happens infrequently, this behavior is by design... so there's nothing to fix in this regard. These NiMH packs "need" to be forcefully cycled up once in a while particularly when the accumulated error factor (instrumented) becomes more pronounced.

Cheers;

MSantos

 

Would you describe a recalibration every ~200 miles as infrequent? That seems a little frequent to me. In fact, I had it happen on the way home tonight. The MMH recals every 10k, and it uses the batteries a lot harder than the HCH does. It doesn't seem to affect my mileage much though--I kept it above 60, even after the recal....

I think in my case, it's worth documenting with Honda. I doubt the dealer will be able to find anyting or do anything, but if there ever is a TSB, I would like to get in early on it.

 

Indeed, I agree that having it occur every 200 miles is hardly infrequent. Somehow, I failed to read that constraint in the previous post.

Cheers;

MSantos

 

I think I had this happen to my 2006 HCH2 last week. It has 25,000 kilometers on it and this was the first re-cal. First indication of a problem was a miss or bucking of the ICE. Then I noticed the SOC was at 1 bar. After about 10K's the SOC was full. The funny part was, I don't remember seeing any green regen bar's while all this was going on. Could this be posible or was I not watching close enough? H

 

Same situation for me. Last weekend's heat wave caused a lot of drain on the battery charge while the A/C kept me cool in city traffic. At times there was no more assist with 4 or less bars, only A/C and idle auto stop. Going on a parkway (55 MPH) tended to bring it back up to full.

Generally, high-speed driving usually gets my charge up to high levels; City driving keeps my charge around medium levels with some swing up and down, depending on the number of stops.

Winter seems to have much more influence on my fuel efficiency, because there is a long warm-up before assist, regen, and idle auto stop can begin working.

 

I can usually tell it is going to happen before it actually crashes, and it starts with the regen NOT coming on in a situation where it should. Next, it will sometimes it will put up two static bars of regen (that won't increase or decrease with speed or pedal pressure changes) but not always--this happens probably about half of the time. Next, the SoC will drop to 1 bar.

As I mentioned above, weather does not seem to be a factor for me. I am very frugal with the battery pack too--I try to never be below 5 bars, and I use assist very sparingly for normal driving. I've done about 5 road trips to the mountains which seems to be pretty taxing on the batts, but that doesn't seem to cause any recal events.

 

Well this has happened only once on a normal 80deg. day. I have been waiting for the next occurence so I can sort of watch what goes on. The car has done a few funny things since. One day I was coasting and I noticed the fuel usage was pegged at max.. I had to tap the throttle to get it to drop to zero. The car has not been up to par since. I'm hoping it will shack out of it soon. I only drive the car a couple times a week , so it is hard to get a good feel for things, going on with the car. Fe in town is 5 ltr. per 100 k's, so that is OK.H

 

harold: thats fine when the FE drops to max, it will slowly go up on the display but in reality u are not using any gas. I think this is called the mamba dance and you can search the forum for this as its very common, especially if u are warming up.

kristian: that does not sound normal at all at least to me.