clarity PHEV dead after 3 weeks in garage

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jerry JLV
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Thanks to all for your informative posts!

What is the best solution for me now? Jump start the car and drive the car around hoping the 12v battery is still in good health and can be charged back to near full capacity? How long will that take? I read this article claiming driving the car might not be able to charge a dead battery (and it is a bad idea to do so). (https://ricksfreeautorepairadvice.com/charge-a-car-battery-after-jump-start/)

or buy a trickle charger to charge the battery?

there is also the question about the condition of the battery, if it is damaged after being fully discharged for a while.
 
Yep, we do tend to stray a bit don't we (um, I mean me)...

I would jump the car, drive to the dealer and have them LOAD test it. It will likely fail. They should, considering the age of your vehicle, give you a new one and would hope, completely free of charge with an apology and free donuts and coffee. I would not bother to try and resuscitate that battery. If it went below 10 volts, it sustained some capacity damage, especially if it was in that state for a period of time (days or more). Again, simple solution - get new battery, make them pay for it. They can also check the parasite drain on your car just to be sure. It should settle down to less than 100ma after a few minutes. The Honda Tech manual lists tolerances, but I can't find that right now, and it doesn't matter. As @craze1cars would likely say, if they give you any grief find another shop and remember them if they treat you well.

As to the trickle charger, if you are not driving much they are good investments. Get a good one, a bad one will just ruin your "new" battery. There is a completely separate thread on that. Amazon reviews are good, and folks here have suggestions. My 2 Sanders Pennies worth are ones made by VDC (Batteryminders). I have used a lot of them in my industry and I have had success with them. However, there may be ones less expensive that do an adequate job.

Cheers,

Cash
 
There are at least a couple of other things that come to mind that could cause the car to "wake up":
  • Having a charge timer set - the car will likely try to initiate a charge session at the set time. This would also trigger attempts to connect to Hondalink with success/failure reports.
  • IIRC, you can (or could) set Hondalink to notify you if it was below xx% charge at a certain time (and not plugged in to charge?).
There are likely other settings that could triggerpower draws.
 
Jerry JLV said:
Thanks to all for your informative posts!

What is the best solution for me now?.
Click to expand...

My recommendation remains same as before. Get car to dealer using whatever method you like, tell them battery died and car wouldn’t start. Ask them for new battery for free.
 
Cash Traylor said:
That is an interesting question and hypothesis... I don't know, and am not 100% certain I understand your statement/question. Are you not using Hondalink? Never activated it with a Honda account/VIN etc?
Click to expand...

Correct. Hondalink has not been activated on the vehicle.

It has now been parked for 6 weeks. It could be a few more weeks before we’d consider making such a non-essential trip to swap vehicles.

I’d imagine the battery would be ~12.2V after 8 weeks, based on it being 12.45V after 4 weeks. If it goes more than 8 weeks, I may ask a friend to go over to check the voltage, see if it will turn on and connect the battery tender.
 
@Landshark

You have a very interesting test case and I think you are absolutely correct. I would be very interested to see how your battery is holding up with your car in "stand alone" mode. I do not think Honda pings the car routinely for data. I think the car is the instigator most of the time, and has the before mentioned "trigger events" that cause it to update the Honda status servers. As such, your car was never "activated" on the server for anything beyond whatever Honda is tracking internally, which based on their "efficiency" paradigm I would bet only happens while charging. I am going to assume most folks here activated HondaLink (and likely everywhere but if you aren't on this forum I am not talking to you). Since Landshark did not, and I understand, and if this drain behavior holds true, now completely agree - you have unique information. It seems this happens enough to trigger threads every so often, and the answer was to get a small jumpstart pack.

If your car lasts months without issue - then Hondalink is looking like a reasonable trouble spot for storage. At this point, then anyone with "activated Hondalink" that puts their vehicle in storage should disable it on their phones (I know I can in Android, I do not know if you can in IOS) and/or remove the "shipping fuses" as identified in the Clarity PDI, and above all else, don't use the app to request vehicle status updates.

May be wrong,

Cash
 
Is it possible the traffic of information begins once the user agrees to sharing their data at HondaLink signup? The information transmissions could continue in one form or the other regardless or what you do (or don’t) with the app now that permission was granted. Just a thought.
 
I don't know, no way for me to test this. Landshark, or someone that never activated Hondalink, could put a meter on their car and do a 24 hour cumulative test to see... However that is a lot of work, requires some specific equipment (not expensive but not generic, pretty special purpose) and honestly I doubt it. I believe Honda contracted for 3G service, and put the Clarity on the market as a test platform (based on price/market) and is using it to gather data. I could be wrong but I bet the car provides some data to Honda that may be de-identified or so basic it doesn't matter (HV System status, age/mileage, usage EV/ICE/Charge etc) but no location or registration. The car has a black box that is running all the time. It is not "activated with purchase" so data is collected and available. How much and what is being reported is harder to know (it gathers a lot of data, systems g forces, driver controls - think of it like a flight data recorder, it is not recording audio but everything else). I can see the Generic PID stream that goes to what I "think" is the TCU ID, but most of it is not on the SAE list and are proprietary so I cannot decode them (not yet at least). Someone who is a real car hacker would have to likely take that on. It is beyond me and there are no real instruction books for this that I have found.

Cash
 
I live in Northern NJ. The Clarity PHEV is garaged. This is what I did...

Case #1 My Clarity Touring sitting unused for about a week. I connected my 750ma Deltran Battery Tender Junior (normally used to maintain the motorcycle battery in the off season) to the 12 volt battery and I monitored the usage with a Wemo Smart Plug with energy monitoring.
Results: the tender drew about 13 watts for 7 hours 40 min. before going into standby mode (less than 2 watts draw).

Case #2 car driven 171 miles then the traction battery was charged to 95%. The Clarity then sat for about 24 hours. Then I connected the Clarity to the battery tender just like in case #1.
Results: The battery tender ran for 15 minutes at 13 watts then went into standby mode (less than 2 watts draw). 4.5 hours later I noticed the battery tender must have come out of standby mode because the Wemo had registered 35 minutes of additional usage for a total of 50 minutes of charging/maintaining.

The Wemo reports anything above 2 watts as usage and the tender generally draws about 13 watts when charging/maintaining the battery so it is measuring as expected.

The above seems to reinforce the hypotheses that the Clarity PHEV does have a decent amount of parasitic loss.
 
I was surprised that the Clarity does not require an AGM battery which is common in hybrids and found in all BEVs because of their need for a deep cycle 12 v battery. Clarity comes with a regular battery found in other Hondas. I thought that was great if Honda somehow engineered the Clarity to use cheap to replace 12 v battery instead of an expensive AGM battery. After hearing about all these failures, perhaps it should have a more robust 12 v battery?
 
PHEV Newbie said:
I was surprised that the Clarity does not require an AGM battery which is common in hybrids and found in all BEVs because of their need for a deep cycle 12 v battery. Clarity comes with a regular battery found in other Hondas. I thought that was great if Honda somehow engineered the Clarity to use cheap to replace 12 v battery instead of an expensive AGM battery. After hearing about all these failures, perhaps it should have a more robust 12 v battery?
Click to expand...


I wouldn’t call it a failure but there are definitely some power draw when the car is sitting that one has to be aware of if storing for weeks.
 
Another update to my Case #2: asking for an updated location through the HondaLink app caused the battery tender to come out of standby mode for about 5 minutes. It started at a draw of 11 watts and tapered down to 5 watts before going standby again.
 
PHEV Newbie said:
I was surprised that the Clarity does not require an AGM battery which is common in hybrids and found in all BEVs because of their need for a deep cycle 12 v battery. Clarity comes with a regular battery found in other Hondas. I thought that was great if Honda somehow engineered the Clarity to use cheap to replace 12 v battery instead of an expensive AGM battery. After hearing about all these failures, perhaps it should have a more robust 12 v battery?
Click to expand...
Why would the Clarity PHEV deep cycle its 12 V battery if it’s driven normally, i.e. not sitting for weeks? I’ve checked mine w a VOM and it doesn’t appear to be significantly discharged or stressed. I drive 90%+ in EV, but I also checked it once when I was doing short HV trips to keep my gas from getting more than a year old.
I just don’t see any 12V battery worries if the Clarity is normally driven and if the dealer didn’t let it sit long term without charging either battery.

Unless your Clarity is going for sit for more than 2-3 weeks, it should be fine unless there is an underlying problem. Since I already have a Deltran Battery Tender, I hook it it if I’m only for for a week but that’s just to prolong the life of the 12 V battery for as long as possible. If I didn’t already have the battery tender. I wouldn’t buy one unless my Clarity was going for more than 2 weeks.
maybe we can get some posts on battery voltage after sitting for 1, w, 3, and 4 weeks.
 
The Gadgeteer said:
Case #1 My Clarity Touring sitting unused for about a week. I connected my 750ma Deltran Battery Tender Junior (normally used to maintain the motorcycle battery in the off season) to the 12 volt battery and I monitored the usage with a Wemo Smart Plug with energy monitoring.
Results: the tender drew about 13 watts for 7 hours 40 min. before going into standby mode (less than 2 watts draw).
Click to expand...

Below is a photo of the same device from my collection. Another way to measure the charge that was applied to your battery is to multiply the output by the hours. In this case, .75A x ~8 hours = 6A. Not much after sitting for a week, given that LA batteries typically self-discharge 10% per month with no loads.

The above formula assumes the maintainer is operating at maximum output, I do not know if the output is variable as it is so minuscule even at max. Interestingly, it shows an input of .275A at 120V which equals 33W, and your meter measured a load of only 13W.

B1767181-E19C-4D0A-B22D-67069E99C120.webp
 
The 13w May include losses/overhead by both the tender and Wemo. It is variable. I have seen values between 5w and 13w. Smaller batteries and fully charged batteries are cases when I will typically see lower values.
 
Just want to give an update on the original post, I had the car towed to the dealer, the battery failed the load test so the dealer replaced the battery, but it is a different honda battery without the status window/hole. Dealer said they see quite a lot battery related issues recently due to the covid-19 situation.
I bought the battery tender and the smart plug from amazon. According to the smart plug, the battery tender is currently drawing about 2.3 w. that is 191mA, google tells me a standard 12V battery is 42000mAH, so that is 42000/191=219 Hours = 9.2 Days. Is that correct?
 
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