EV only Range after nearly 4 years... where you guys at?

I miss-placed my OBDII reader else I'd read again and report. I presume it will turn up eventually. My amp hours were normal when the car was relatively new (53.2) and I presume they're still fine (meaning degraded with time, but nothing out of ordinary). I suspect that early on with the Clarity PHEV they had problems with a 3-way valve some folks in these forums spoke about. The gist of the issue is that the car is designed to use engine heat when available, and electric heat when not. You then heard radio silence on this issue and I believe Honda issued a software fix. The "fix" was most likely to just use electric heater 100% of the time, even when the ICE runs.

Anyway, the reason for this "conspiracy" theory on engine heat is my range has always been super low in winter. Winter EV range (around 24 miles now) but I get similar range to others in the summer time. Maybe still on the low side as I live on a hill, so maybe ideal temps like now, I get 36-38 EV range.

So I think the lack of heatpump on all PHEV Clarities is a serious hit to range. Speculation on my part that its possible more so on some units where the spare gas engine heat isn't usable. i.e. it takes Honda's money to fix a warranty issue. If true, and its just odd that no one talks about that specific fix now. That and some of us get really poor winter range.

 

Day to day in the city, I rarely need all the electric range, so I don't mind the hit in the winter. When I take a road trip during the winter, I've had great results running the first 15 minutes or so on gasoline, then switching to EV for about 10 minutes with the heat turned down, then back to gasoline for 15 minutes with the heat turned back up and then continue to alternate back and forth until the battery is drained to about 20%, this will drain my battery without using much of the kWh for heat since the cabin was warmed from the gasoline engine. I still get pretty good mpg on gasoline as the heat was from waste heat anyway and the battery range is pretty good. I'll use the last 20% just before I get somewhere to recharge.

 

My 35 mile-ish commute: The first 8 miles was a 55mph road I would set the cruise control to 60-63, the next 20 miles was all freeway I would set the cruise control to 75-78mph, the 5 miles was city driving at 30-35 depending on the road.

 

The use of the word “was” suggests that you are no longer driving this route as described above. Are you still driving this route as you were before? Are you driving the same route at higher speeds? Are you driving a different route?

Ii is impressive that you drove 20 miles at 75-78mph and still managed to get 47 or more EV miles per charge.

 

I still drive the same route. It's just that secretly, I'm a time traveler (Don't tell anyone), and my sense of present and past tenses has become meaningless. Yeah, I was really happy with the car during the first two summers, but now issues are starting to arise. Not super stoked on 35 mile range, the battery runs out and drops to zero bars instead of two, then starts to scream. Additionally, the lagging cruise control is getting tiresome.

 

Was you still driving the same speeds now that you are driving in the past?

I’m only asked because you are going to mentioning things about faster speed during pandemic and no popo enforce of speeds at some point in the future.

 

I think it is more accurate to keep track of batt capacity then max mileage on EV. People have put on different tires that would affect efficiency.

 

My range fluctuates a lot with weather (other variables unchanged). I do mid 60s most of the year, but with temps above 95F it can go down to mid 40s, curiously even lower than what I do in Las Vegas "winter". I have never gone below 50 miles with temps on the high 30s or low 40s. I blame it on the A/C. Battery is 50.1 Ah, 35K miles, 2018 PHEV Touring.

 

No worries. These days you don't need to be a time traveler to lose any sense of tense, or any other grammatical rule. Now I always get confused about how many people (one or several) is someone talking about when using "them" or "they"... maybe "they" have double vision...

 

Them, is a TV series.
They, is a movie.
Them!, is a movie.

I haven’t watched any of them.

 

I found my OBDII adapter and got a reading at my lunch break.
48.14 AH vs -- was 53.2 when new from the dealer.
has 54,174 miles now. Purchased late September 2018 (manufactured June 2018). It's the 2018 model year.
So this is basically 5 years of use -- and down 5.06 AH.

 

Because you're keeping track of such film and TV series titles, you probably already know they're remaking "Them!" I expect you can't wait to not watch it.

 

Do we know how much energy the electric heat consumes?

I once drove 14 miles in EV, with the heat at FTB on a route that was repeated almost daily with no heat and there wasn’t a noticeable difference in remaining range at the 14 mile mark.

Obviously, the motor will use more energy driving at 60mph for 14 minutes than if the car were driven at slower speeds in stop and go traffic for 45-60 minutes to cover the same distance. So the impact of cabin heat on range, might be more noticeable under certain circumstances.

 

There is certainly something peculiar going on with your car. The “hill” which you recently explained as not being at 1600’ elevation, or 1600’ above the valley floor, is much less of an elevation gain than we experience on a daily basis. Yet we see a winter range of 36-39 miles and are now seeing 45-47 in warmer temperatures. Granted, we rarely exhaust the battery on a daily basis, so I’m only providing the numbers from the EV range estimate.

 

Yes, I measured the cabin heater and it draws approximately 6.2 kW. This is the full-on current, so it represents the maximum value.

Once the cabin reaches the desired temperature, the heater will cycle on an off, so the average power consumption will be less than this (depending on how cold it is outside).

Suppose for the sake of illustration, you could get 50 miles of EV range without the heater. You could drive 50 mph for an hour. This drive requires about 12.5 kWh of energy. If your heater is on, and it needed to operate at 50% average duty cycle to maintain cabin temperature. This would require 3.1 kWh so your range would drop from 50 miles to around 38 miles.

 

For my 2018 Honda Clarity Touring - The range has dropped from 46 miles to 32 miles. Since we finally installed a home charger, the battery which is supposed to be 17kwh is only charging 10.8kwh according to the Juicebox info... is it time to look into battery replacement before the extended warranty runs out?

 

The battery warranty is not based on the amount of energy input during a charge, and it is not based on EV range...
The warranty is based on the battery 'capacity'. The capacity of a new battery is 55 ampere-hours (Ah). The warranty applies if the capacity drops below 2/3 of this initial value (36.7 Ah).

The vehicle keeps track of this capacity, but it must be read through the OBD2 port by the dealer, or by the DIY method that we have come up with. You can see how to read the capacity yourself here, along with more details:
https://github.com/clarity-phev/Battery-Capacity-Read

If I took an educated guess, with 10.8 kWh for a full charge, your battery capacity is likely to be around 40 Ah.

 

Probably not.

Depending on the state in which the vehicle is registered, the battery is covered under a Federal Emissions Warranty for either 8 years or 100,000 miles, or 10 years or 150,000 miles. To my knowledge, there is not an “Extended Warranty” that covers the battery beyond those warranty periods.

The battery is rated as having 17kWh’s of capacity. However, the useable amount of energy in the battery is approximately 13.5-14kWh’s. Your reading of 10.8kWh’s is roughly 20% less that what would be seen with a new battery. This would suggest that the battery has roughly 2/3rds of the degradation required to meet the warranty threshold.

 

My experience was full charge was 'only' 12.6 kwh when new.

The 17 KW battery has buffers at top and bottom that cannot be used. These buffers are to protect the battery. The bottom buffer varies with use. If you use a car scanner (OBDII) to read the battery level, the car is at 0 EV miles when battery shows 11% remaining charge. If you continue to drive, the engine will start, but the battery level will control about 7.5% actual charge. The battery meter on the dash will be at 2 bars until the actual charge gets to about 2%, and drops to one bar. Battery meter drops to no bars right around zero real charge. Apparently, this is hard on the battery. Going up a hill, the battery charge seems to go below zero real charge. At some point, the battery will stop giving power, and the display will show a power reduced message (You do not want to do this to your battery.).

 

But do you think it might be good for the battery to do this occasionally? I have never dropped mine below 2 bars in 4.5 years, might that not contribute to reduced battery capacity? My understanding of the way to do this is to drive slowly when EV gets near 0 until the engine comes on, then go up to highway speeds with the AC on to suck battery energy while the engine warms up enough to recharge.