My terrible morning with the Clarity

Subscribe to Remove Ads
G

Geor99

Well-Known Member
I've owned the Clarity since 2018 and I know better, but today I screwed up royally.

I begin my 38 mile commute on a full battery. Everyday, I go 20 miles and then switch to hybrid driving. Well, today for the first time, I forgot to hit the hv button and terror followed.

I'm driving along as normal going 75 on the San Diego freeway, when I heard the gas engine kick in with a roar, while my power plummeted. I look at the battery strength and I see 1 bar. It almost never has gone below 2.

I quickly click HV Charge to try and get some more battery and power. I slow to 40mph and put on my hazards. Of course, a steep freeway hill is approaching. I barely make it over the hill with the engine roaring and going only 15mph. The 1 bar from earlier is now gone- zero bars.

I barely make it to the side of the freeway with cars racing past me. It took 20 minutes of idle charging to get to 3 miles of ev. I then made it to work.

The car was bricked. Don't forget to hit that hv button, guys. With some really crappy luck, it could be your last mistake!!!!

I can't fathom how there is no way to prevent this from happening if you forget to hit the button, besides driving in HV always. Maybe I need to always start in HV and end ev. I'd have to forget twice to lose power - initially to start the trip and again after 30 miles or so.
 
Last edited:
Geor99 said:
Don't forget to hit that HV button, guys. With some really crappy luck, it could be your last mistake!!!!
Click to expand...
I tape this over my D button to remind me to press HV after stopping. Perhaps you could tape it on your steering wheel hub to remind you to press HV at the appropriate time during your drive.

1774895238072.webp
 
It was a terrifying experience on the freeway with people driving crazy fast and not having any power up a hill. Terrible experience. My heart rate was as redlined as the gas engine!!!

Hopefully I have more bars of heart life Left:)
 
First off, I'd just like to say I'm sorry to hear this happened. I totally get how bad this is (and can be). It's to the point where I am unlikely to lend my car to someone who isn't "initiated." My Clarity hasn't lost power yet, but I think what you get is that last 10% buffer and then bingo, you hit no power. I suspected this earlier on, but there's now too many reports from reliable reporters to dismiss this.

What's happened for me as my car aged is EV range has gone down generally. But this also means the buffer is now smaller. So that warning time, aka "angry bees" seems to go to true zero almost immediately. When the car was new, I could push it for a few miles past 0 if I was already close to my home charger. I never do that now.
 
If the hill in my story was just a little longer and or steeper, I could imagine a situation where I would be stuck and not even able to drive to the side of the freeway. Id have to try to back into it going the wrong way on an extremely busy freeway letting gravity do the work.

If I did stuck, I would have to idle charge the car for maybe as long as 1/2 hour to safely get up the imaginary freeway hill in my brain exercise,;). And I would be one of those aholes that makes 1000s of people late to work in the morning.

I curse these people and don't want to be one of them:). I swear I saw the same guy causing a 20 minute traffic delay in the same broken down car twice in the same week once years ago. His incompetence inconvenienced 10s of 1000s or at least a couple 1000 people, it seemed
 
Geor99 said:
I curse these people and don't want to be one of them:). I swear I saw the same guy causing a 20 minute traffic delay in the same broken down car twice in the same week once years ago. His incompetence inconvenienced 10s of 1000s or at least a couple 1000 people, it seemed
Click to expand...

I guess everyone is annoyed by different things. Do you think that guy did it intentionally just to inconvenience other people?
 
There are accidental breakdowns and willfully refusal to do proper maintenance or not being able to afford maintaining a car, but still driving one.

Let's assume that one's car is so poorly maintained that it needs a friend to tow it home via a rope once per week on average, causing a huge traffic delay each time.

These people, who are common in my imagination but probably not in reality, are the ones that infuriate me. I erroneously attribute almost 20% of traffic jams to their poor car maintenance:)

You guys obviously don't know me, but this is an example of my terribly unfunny brand of humor.
 
Man, I am a really slow learner sometimes:) Im driving in to work this am on the exact same route as in my story above. I get an important conference call from work, so I listen on the car's Bluetooth speaker as I drive to work

After a while, I see the same hill from my story, and anxiety shot through me, as as unbelievable as it is, I forgot to hit the hv button AGAIN!!!!

Luckily, I had a couple of ev miles left, so ev charge got me to a safe ev mileage with no other actions needed.

I'm definitely going to start hv button pushing in the beginning instead of the ending of my trips:)
 
I'll usually drive the first 6-8 miles in EV and then switch to HV (just to get a little room in the battery for regen). Then I'll switch back to EV when I have a couple of more miles on the battery GOM than the trip remaining (assuming I can charge at the destination). I don't mind giving up a couple of miles of EV just to make sure I don't have to run the engine with a discharged battery.
 
There was a member who claimed to never charge the battery and the car was driven as a taxi/uber. I recall the car had been driven nearly 200,000 miles in 2 years. It must be close to miraculous that this vehicle was never hobbled on the side of the road.

Shortly after we got our new Clarity, we powered southbound on I-5 over the Siskiyou pass in EV mode, draining the battery after just 25 miles of travel. We then continued through hilly/mountainous terrain for roughly 80 more miles with a drained battery until we passed Lake Shasta and dropped into Redding. The engine revved along the way but the car always maintained speeds of 60-70mph. At some point in the San Joaquin Valley I enabled HV Charge just to see how it worked. It took about 45 minutes to charge the battery half way so I set it back to HV.

Eventually we reached the Grapevine and went over the Tejon Pass, still with a half charged battery. Granted, this is a long steady incline and we’d done the north side of the Siskiyou Pass in EV, but the performance of the car with a half charged battery wasn’t noticeably different that the way it performed with a depleted battery.

If there’s a moral to this story it’s that I can see how an owner might drive many miles on gasoline with a depleted battery.
 
It's just unbelievable that if you forget to hit a button and if you're going more than 50 Miles, the car could very well lose almost all power and strand you on the side of the road for 20 minutes, (to recharge.). This assumes that you have enough power to get to the side of the road. If you are on a steep roadway, this situation could have a terrible story.
 
Subscribe to Remove Ads
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top