Yet another cold weather battery/engine staring query

What you report is consistent with what I've seen others report here and on other forums.

A theory is that at temperatures somewhat below 10°F the car routinely starts the ICE to provide cabin heat, rather than pulling it from an already-stressed battery. Things will be better and more normal when this bizarre cold wave ends.

 

@Stuart Friedman

Is it really you? Congratulations on your new car! I got mine back in October. Still trying to get all the gadgets straight in my head. Passed not far from you on my way back from Kansas after Christmas. The car is really great for long trips. Love to Ellen. Marj

 

My USA model (no battery heater) was 1 F (-17 C, see HondaLink temp) this AM (parked & L2 charged outside), preconditioned 30 min (drew 2.6 kWh), drove 33+ miles roundtrip (see odometer A, resets with each charge), ICE did not turn on (note HV range unchanged at 276 miles). Car ran flawlessly.

I think preconditioning is key to performance at low temp, but obviously draws power while doing so.

Sent using Inside EVs mobile app

 

Great news on preconditioning allowing all EV at 1 F and even with charging outside.
Did you run the cabin heat at all on the trip and if so at what setting?
Thanks for sharing.

 

@Stuart Friedman - I had this problem a lot, and then @MNSteve solved the mystery. What was starting the ICE was the fan when heating the car.

I always have my climate control set to "Auto" and the moment I got into the car and started it in ultra-cold weather (0F and below), the ICE would turn on.

At the suggestion of @MNSteve I manually turned the fan down to a low speed and VOILA! No ICE turn on even in very cold weather!

Thank you, @MNSteve

 

If your key fob won't work at that distance, you can start preconditioning through HondaLink from anywhere (from anywhere you have cell service, that is).

 

Is there a setting for it to do that or are you manually resetting each time?

 

This table appears on page 327 of the Owners Manual:

 

After preconditioning the cabin is 70 F, and with the seat heater on, I find that I'm comfortable (in the coat I wore as I walked to the car) for trips of 30-60 minutes. On that trip, I did have some windshield fog, and used the front defogger for 5-10 minutes without enginulation.

 

I will feel truly bad about this if one day they find you frozen in your car because you didn't turn on the heat!

 

Many people in here refer to ev range
Changing. Even after the service bulletin i still find mine very fickle. So if i want to see how my ev range is actually performing, i use the miles drven and the percentage of charge remaining via the Honda link app or just look at the bars remaining for a ball park number. I know how the milage of various routes i drive and moniter my soc percentage at the end of the trip. Far more accurate than the fickle range estimator.

 

Another anecdotal piece of data relative to the ICE starting when it's cold.

This morning I preconditioned in my garage where the temperature was about 20°F. The ICE did not start when I started the car. I drove to my first stop in EV. The car sat in the parking lot for about 15 minutes. When I started it after this first stop, the ICE immediately came on. The interesting thing was that the temperature on the dash gauge read exactly 10°F. And yes, I had the heat set to 68. The ICE ran long enough to get itself toasty warm and then shut down, not to restart for the rest of the trip. I do not think this was a maintenance start because the ICE ran as recently as a few days ago. Another interesting tidbit is that the display did not show any energy flow from the engine to the battery.

After spending 15 minutes or so in the second store, again with the car parked in the lot, the temperature had risen a whole degree, putting it above 10. The ICE did not start.

I'm wondering if 10°F outside temperature is magic, and the car controller decides that if the temperature is that cold that running the ICE for generating cabin heat is a good idea. Who knows, really. This car is complex enough that we will never be able to reverse engineer it with the limited data we have available.

 

In one of threads someone mentioned that the ice may come in to help maintain the cabin temp without draining the battery so fast in cold temps.

 

Yes, I'm the someone. What I'm trying to understand is the definition of "cold temps". Like everything else on this car, it seems to be unpredictable, but we know that it's not.

 

I noticed that I have to keep the fan below 3 to keep the engine off in cold weather, at least for the first few miles.
And another thing, the lack of a battery heater is really slowing down my charging when it is cold.
Our Volt charges faster at 0 degrees using a 3 Kw charger.
How much did Honda save deleting the battery heater?

 

I am willing to bet the engine turns on based on battery temperature not air temperature.

 

The cost of the power seats? The majority of Clarity PHEVs sold will never have need of a battery heater.

 

Thanks for sharing all the cold weather experiences and five of us some more data points.
Man, reverse engineering this technological wonder is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark with mittens on!