Battery Tracking

[Puppethead]

Does anyone (especially existing EV owners) do anything related to battery tracking? I ran across this battery comparison app (iPhone/iPad) which seems to only support Tesla Model 3s, but the idea is to keep track of battery condition.

Maybe something else would be better, and it's not clear to me if the conventional wisdom of Tesla charging even applies to the SE.

 

[Toi]

as the mini takes care of the whole 80-20% mess for you, I would say put a few hundred miles on it to get them broken in, record your baselines, and then record every month/quarter/year (whatever suits your data gathering sensibilities) to monitor.

 

[insightman]

MINI service departments have a way to measure the battery capacity so they can determine if a battery qualifies for a warranty replacement. If my MINI makes it off the Grand Hero at the Port of Baltimore tonight, it might get here before my dealer closes forever a week from Monday. I will ask the service department to have their SE-trained technician to use his SE-training to check my SE's battery capacity and give me the number (I assume the number will be Amp-hours). Well, I'll ask the service department to do that after they fix whatever caused the "stop-sale" with @Puppethead's MINI Cooper SE before he could take delivery this week.

 

[fizzit]

It would be great if we could find the OBD codes for the Mini or a service menu like there is for the i3 so we can directly see estimated battery capacity and maybe even cell voltages. When I had a Spark EV I was able to use the Torque Pro app with OBD codes for the Bolt to see a ton of information including capacity.

Until then, sounds like if you want to know your battery health you need to get it tested at a dealership (which probably just involves them checking it with an OBD reader or accessing the service menu) or you can use the trip odometer and trip mi/kWh gauge combined with the reported battery % to get a rough capacity estimate.

 

[insightman]

It would be great if we could find the OBD codes for the Mini

On InsideEVs' Clarity forum, the Autel Maxisys OBDII scanner is the only one identified so far that can obtain the Battery Capacity number for the Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid that Honda service facilities obtain using their proprietary iHDS computer systems. The Autel Maxisys MS906 costs $1,099 on Amazon. Autel has not yet seen fit to include this capability in their $59 AP200M phone-based OBDII scanners.

It is likely that the BMW i3 and the MINI Cooper SE work the same way. Here's an article about extracting i3 data, including battery capacity.

Edit: One of the comments following that 2016 BMW i3 data extraction article:
> Should be made clear that Max.Kappa is not an
> indication of battery health or real capacity. It is
> a guess for that particular time, and is calibrated
> at service intervals, so if for example it read
> 19.1 kWh and then after a service 18.8 kWh does
> not mean you have lost capacity. Nor does a
> reading of 17.4 kWh mean you have lost capacity
> over the warrantied 18.8 kWh.

 

[fizzit]

Strange. I don't understand how the readout capacity wouldn't be an indication of battery health or actual capacity. It might have a bit of error at any given time but it seems like if you track it over time it should average out to your real capacity. Otherwise, I don't know what it could possibly be useful for.