You have three choices:

1. Buy the battery as though it was any other over-the-counter part with no special treatment or documentation.
2. Try to buy the battery but ask for any of this silliness you're imagining and be told a HARD NO.
3. Don't buy the battery.

You also need to plan for TWO trips and the core charge. The battery is NOT drop-in. You must move all of the electronics/relay, etc. from the old battery to the new. The new battery includes: 34 modules, upper and lower case sheet metal, temperature sensors, bus bars and main wires. Opening the case to observe all 34 module S/N is tedious and almost always rips the foam piece. The dealer will adamantly refuse to open the case as it's not required for installation.

 

Mr. Keith,

Here's the report after a week of driving after the single discharge to 163V and other actions. Would be grateful for your perusal and advice.

Thanks.

 

In the battery health section, notable is the 0.25V ceiling on the voltage deviation and the increase of estimated capacity to about 4Ah.

This is a demonstrable improvement.

If you want to experiment, you could repeat the process to see if any additional gains can be had. Given the ~15-20% improvement, I would not expect there to be any additional improvement beyond 3-5%, and IMHO, that's not worth it.

Repeat discharge test every 6 months and decide if you want to conduct a single cycle.

 

Thanks, Mr. Keith. Will repeat the test in 6 months and do another cycle then if needed. I am curious about how long I can expect the battery to last with periodic cycles like this. Also, would I always only dicharge to 163V or is there a situation where I would go lower.

EDIT: Car currently has ~155K miles.

 

Diagnostic tests aren't predictive, nor can the longevity benefit of reconditioning be quantified.

Problems start occurring very regularly once a battery deteriorates to 35-40% rated capacity. The longer you can stay above that threshold, the better.

Other measures such as more conservative driving, heavy A/C use with center vents lobbing their output onto the back deck, sun shades, shade, covered parking, cracking windows 1/4-1/2 inch, park facing West so that the sunshade is more effective, etc., can potentially increase battery life.

 

Thank you, Mr. Keith.

 

Mr. Keith, I am also curious if light corrosion of the bus bars, which I noticed when I connected the harness 2 years back have a role to play in the deterioration of the battery. If not, I am wondering how to tell if the corrosion becomes significant enough at some point in the future that the bus bars need to be cleaned/replaced. Thanks.

 

While one can find accounts of alleged avoidance of battery replacement by cleaning bus bars, those accounts rarely include follow-up.

Personally, in well over 400 batteries, I have never encountered one that had corrosion sufficient to inhibit function. The operational portion of the bus bar is where it contacts the terminal end faces. If the contact faces are clean, then bus bar function is not compromised. One can't tell if the face is clean without removing it; however, in my experience, even in the cases where the copper was black and crusty, the bus bar contact faces were clean.

That said, I either use cleaned or nickel plated bus bars when assembling a battery.

Will it benefit you? Probably not.

Wil it hurt anything? No, as long as you re-torque all terminal nuts to 48 in-lb.

Will it make you feel better? Yes.

 

Thanks for the info on the bus bars. A friend of mine got his HV battery replaced at the dealer 4 days back. I did a HA test on the new battery and attached is the report. It shows the capacity as 5.27Ah which seems low to me. Also, the foam piece at the right rear corner is sliced and there are dark smears on the rear bottom lip of the battery (photo attached). Would be grateful for your comments.

 

Black is uncleaned residue from welding.

Outside case is consistent with a new battery.

Torn foam is atypical.

Test looks like a new battery:

The SoC curve in the health test is constant slope resembling a "V" between charging and discharging.

DeltaV only breaks 0.2V on 3 instances.

Capacity number is EXTRAPOLATED from a test of a only 29.4% of its operating range. It's not exact. I'm not the least bit concerned about the number.

You can remove the ducting going into the top of the case from the fan and take a picture of the closest module S/N.