driving on a depleted battery

Bas said:
A few months ago I saw in a thread that somebody depleted his battery to 0% (whereas normally it will not go down lower than 10%). I think it was after a hilly ride. At that moment I assumed that the last 10% are exactly for those circumstances were you need to scale a decent slope for a decent distance. If the system would let you go down to 0% battery available, and then you would need to scale that same hill, then all you would have available is the ICE. And since it doesn't clutch to the shaft at lower speeds, you would only have about 60HP available. Can't imagine how to lug a 4000+ ride up a hill with only about 60HP, and no gearbox to shift down!
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It should go into serial hybrid mode, so the low gear of the ev drive moves the wheels. Not sure how much power you can get this way though it should be more than 60 HP.
 
ProspectiveBuyer said:
How does everyone else cope with this issue?
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When we are on a long trip (out of battery), we try to put the car into HV Charge mode for a few miles when we know a hill is coming up. Usually you can see a range of hills well before you get there :-)

While it is nicer to have a few bars of battery when going up a steep hill, I've tried a couple with the battery at two bars, and the car does just fine, altho it does go into "angry bees" mode sometimes.
 
On another forum I saw that the car keep 2 or 2.5 kwh in reserve. My guess, and only a guess, is that it uses this to actually drive the car and accelerate as needed, while the gas engine charges the battery as fast as it can. I've run out of electricity on purpose a few times, just to see what will happen. If I'm already driving normally, you can barely hear the gas engine go on. If you are going slowly, or stopped, you can hear the gas engine and if you rabbit from a stop then the little engine goes very fast (angry bees, but that seems an exaggeration) to make up for the electricity you're using. On occasion, I've driven the car for hundreds of miles at 'empty of electricity' and it was as responsive as I would want, but I must mention that there's not many hills in Florida. Seems that Honda has engineered a winner.
 
FYI, the Honda link app routinely shows my battery discharging to single-digit percentages. i.e. 4% and 1% and I've seen 0%. That's the world my Clarity lives in. It cannot retain 10% or whatever normal should be. And yes, there is a correlation to high-RPM (aka angry bees) sound.
 
Dan Albrich said:
FYI, the Honda link app routinely shows my battery discharging to single-digit percentages. i.e. 4% and 1% and I've seen 0%. That's the world my Clarity lives in. It cannot retain 10% or whatever normal should be. And yes, there is a correlation to high-RPM (aka angry bees) sound.
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Dan Albrich

Assuming all sensors/data reporting is accurate...that is disheartening to me.

I know you have participated in several threads about SoC and high revs. The responses to your situation are already documented. Could be battery health. Could be software. Could be hardware. Could be a whole host of things that could be ciphered out if Honda would take the time or even acts remotely concerned.

I offer this:

The data which has been collected off of 3 Clarity's continues to support the correlation between the hondalink app % charge and the SoC as reported by an OBDll device. All three Clarity's show 8-10% charge on hondalink at EV 0 miles and two bars remaining on SoC gauge.

All 3 Clarity's exhibit "normal" driving at EV 0, SoC ~10...meaning...no excessive revving. The Clarity software/hardware seemingly works well to maintain SoC at ~10. Engine clutch engagement seemingly operates the same regardless of SoC. Not once has the SoC dipped below 8%. If it even gets to ~8%...the Clarity seems to respond by throwing as much energy back into the battery to keep charge at ~10%

I can vouch I would not accept the Clarity performance as you describe. No one should be expected to spend $30-35k on a car and have to worry about day to day performance or have anxiety about "high revs" or "power loss", or making sure this number or that number stays at a certain level. Every Clarity owner should feel confident every time the car is cranked...errr...started...it will perform as advertised.

One suggestion: It might help if you print some of the very helpful/useful info from several threads on this and other sites and take to the dealer. Perhaps you have...dunno.

As always...mo' data needed.

Good luck.
 
On my trip last weekend I used up all the battery driving in HV on a little more than 1 tank of gas. So coming back was at 2 battery bars the whole way, and I noticed there was no way to get the gear icon to come on. Not sure if that was due to the cold weather plus the low battery, or just the low battery. Has anyone been able to get into gear mode with a depleted battery?

It does make sense that gear mode would not be available when depleted since that requires battery assistance more frequently than EV drive.
 
MNSteve said:
I don't know how they managed it, and I have not seen less than two bars since, but when the car was delivered to us the gauge read zero bars.
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It probably shipped with a half charge, someone took it for at test drive and ran it down to 2 bars and then it sat on the lot for months and the charge depleted. I’d get a battery signal test done by the dealership to make sure the battery wasn’t damaged and that it’s still meeting spec.


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One of the things my Clarity did for 4 months (prior to a reboot) is it would literally never show the gear icon in the visual display. Post reboot, when on the freeway on relatively flat ground, I now routinely see the gear icon. I don't understand all the detail of how the Clarity works, but the only time I've seen my Clarity retain EV range in HV mode is when the gear icon is present, or when the gear icon is going in and out frequently.

During my first 4 months, I never saw the gear icon, but I also would consistently deplete EV range in HV mode, even on flat ground at highway speeds. I did get some regen down hills of course, but on flat ground my EV range would slowly deplete to 0. It would take about 100 miles to do so. Post re-boot, i can now drive a few hundred miles with limited EV range depletion. i.e. it still goes down, but the rate has changed dramatically. I recently drove ~260 miles with more than 20 EV range miles remaining. That had never happened before (the reboot).

My car is still a pleasure to drive mostly, but I find for my convenience and state of mind I try to avoid EV range depletion. When EV gets very low, my Clarity isn't nearly as pleasant to drive.
 
Dan Albrich said:
I don't understand all the detail of how the Clarity works, but the only time I've seen my Clarity retain EV range in HV mode is when the gear icon is present, or when the gear icon is going in and out frequently.
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Interesting. One of our common missions is a 95 mile drive, 2/3 of which involves up and down the Appalachians. I do it in SPORT mode to take advantage of the “downshifting” that 4 chevrons of persistent regen provides. During the hilly, twisty part the gear icon appears only rarely. And yet, if I switch to HV with 10 EV miles remaining, the car will generally hover right around there. It may drop to 7 on uphills and go up to 11 on downhills, but usually will try to recover to it’s “set point”.
 
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