Clarity PHEV awakened from winter storage

Woke up my 2018 Clarity PHEV today from its somewhat extended winter storage. For anyone wondering, due to a daughter in college, I have a spare 2009 Chevy Impala sitting around, and chose to beat up the Impala through the dregs of Wisconsin winter instead of my shiny new Clarity. Then I left it linger in storage longer than normal due to suddenly working primarily from home and the fact that the Clarity is my most expensive vehicle to insure. Today was just time to get it out and start driving it, even though it will still be clocking a lot of garage time.

The 12V battery had been on a battery maintainer for the entire 5+ months in storage. Getting in and hitting the start button, the Clarity greeted me like a friend that I haven't seen in a while. Pretty much picked up where we left off. The main drive battery was showing about two-thirds full and 32 miles on the EV range, which is more or less where it was when I parked it in October. I have read discussion on this forum and others that the ICE has a maintenance mode which will force it to run to temperature if it has been dormant for a certain amount of time. Surely after nearly half a year in storage the ICE would want to run, so while I was traveling the ~20 miles home, I kept waiting for it to kick in. After 15 minutes and 10 miles or so of driving, still nothing from the ICE. Since I did want to get a good run on the ICE, I manually selected HV mode for the second half of the drive home. This further deepens the mystery of why the ICE randomly starts of its own doing while driving at low speeds in EV mode with a nearly full charge and when the ICE has previously run within the last 24 hours...

A few minor notes: I got a dash warning that the key fob battery was low. Watched a You-tube video on changing the fob battery when I got home. It's a snap to change and uses the very common CR2032 battery, and I had a spare on hand in the battery drawer. That done, I fired up the Honda Link app to check on the car's status -- which was missing except for the odometer mileage. The range indicator and remote functions did not show up at all. After poking around in the app with no success, I deleted and then reloaded the app. After opening the app and logging back in, all of the range and remote features came back up. Another curiosity was that I soon as I plugged in my 240V home charging cable, the car started charging immediately without pressing the charge button on the fob. I unplugged, waited a minute or so, and then plugged back it. Same result -- immediately started charging. Still scratching my head on this one.

Had to run an errand later in the day. Started with a full charge and 42 miles on the EV range. Drove 33 odometer miles round trip all EV, and had 16 miles of EV range left when I got back home. Charged back to full again and now shows 45 miles EV range. Still wearing the surface rust off the brake rotors. It's actually interesting to drive with the rusty brakes, since it is easy to hear and feel when the friction brakes engage. Otherwise the transition from regen braking to friction braking is so smooth and seamless that you never know. For most normal, gentle stops, the friction brakes come in just for the last few feet.

So now I'll finally be adding to the 6,800 miles on my 2018 Clarity. Wierd, I know.

 

After reading your reply, the light bulb went off. It is probably starting to charge right away upon plugging in, because I disabled vehicle's scheduled charge while it was in storage and have not set one back up yet. Sitting in the dealer's lot with the salesman while I was taking delivery, I set up a charge schedule from the Honda Link app so that it would charge at 11pm daily. This takes advantage of my utility's low time-of-use rate and also charges during the cooler part of the overnight hours. So normally when I plug in, it does nothing until the scheduled charge time. If I wanted to charge at a time other than the scheduled time (for example, when I plug in to charge during the day at work), an additional press of the key fob button that also releases the charge lid is required to start the charge cycle.

I turned off the scheduled charge while it was in storage, because it otherwise would have been sending me reminders every day that the scheduled charge failed because the vehicle was not plugged in. Because I previously had the charge schedule set from the day I bought it, I was taking for granted that pressing the charge lid release button was needed a second time after plugging in to kick off a charge cycle. Thanks!