Is Clarity a dangerous vehicle to own?

I have seen different reports about this, never experienced any problems in 2 years. It is the best car I have ever owned. You never run the battery down to 0. If you are on a trip where the distance is greater than the EV range just drive in HV (gas powered) until you get within range of a charging station. Do not sit for any length of time with the auxiliary being used. If you must sit and wait for someone leave the car running with heater or AC on. It takes very little mileage off and you have no worries restarting the car with a dead battery. AGAIN no problems and it is a great car.

 

What was your experience with loss of power?

Lost speed, couldn't accelerate, unacceptable rpm, unacceptable noise?

 

Yes. The dealer left the traction battery dead (as in completely dead, not even the usual two bar safety). I was on a 50 mph road, and the accelerator just stopped working. The car slowed down to 30 even with it floored, so I pulled into a business parking lot and turned it off and back on and it seemed fine again. Got home and haven't had it happen again since (though I've never let the battery die again, either). Dealers really need to be less stupid about killing the cars before they sell them. They transferred it from another dealer (90 miles odometer when I got it), and I'm assuming it was driven HV with whatever gas was left in the tank then EV until it died and had to be towed the rest of the way. Of course they proudly told me about the full tank of gas they put in it before I left their garage.

 

Sounds like they forgot to tell you about the HV Charge feature as well.

 

I'm not sure that would've helped, given it was already in HV mode out of necessity. HV charge just makes it not turn the engine off until the battery is at 60%; it's not going to magically make the engine produce more power. IME, "HV Charge" doesn't trigger any RPM increase above what HV uses; it just stops the "switch to EV when decelerating or stopped" function.

 

It would have charged the batteries. Once the gauge was at 2 bars or more, the car may have operated as expected.

The engine is rated at 103hp as long as fuel is available. It’s thermodynamics, not magic.

 

There's no excess power to charge the battery if all of the generator output is going to actually moving the car and running the A/C on the 100+ °F day.

 

You're assuming that the engine needs to spin at its max RPM to recharge the battery effectively. This is not the case, and if you use HV Charge mode, you'll hear that the engine is spinning at a modest (most efficient) RPM. If the engine needs to supply power directly to the wheels, all it needs to do is spin faster.

 

As I already said, IME the RPM does NOT go up in HV charge mode. It just doesn't turn off when braking or stopped when it would do so in HV (not charge) mode. Regardless of how 'm driving, in HV charge or HV mode, that is the only difference I see. Available EV miles will go down just the same in either mode in any place they'd normally go down, e.g. acceleration from a stop. HV charge does NOT increase RPM when battery drain (e.g. acceleration) increases. Charging only happens in either HV mode when coasting or decelerating, or when the direct drive is engaged. Maybe it provides just enough power to move the car under ideal conditions, but it surely cannot power the car on its own or Honda would've given us a "GV" mode.

 

I think that we are in violent agreement. HV mode maintains the battery level to the point when you pushed the button, and HV Charge mode keeps the engine running until the battery has reached 58% charge. I did not make any claims that HV charge mode increases the RPMs from regular HV mode.
My point is that if you use HV Charge mode to give the battery pack some extra juice before going up a hill, the combined power from the battery and engine (which is much greater than the engine by itself) will give the car more oomph. If you put the car into HV mode with only two bars (or less) of battery charge, the battery will never be charged enough to give you the extra instantaneous power.

 

You need to back up a few posts. The context here is the dealer left my battery at flat zero, and I am asserting the gas generator really can't (or was programmed whether for safety or longevity to not) produce enough power to move the car on its own in some situations. In those situations, the car handicaps itself, and "power loss" happens.

With the direct drive engaged on a highway at 55+ mph is where HV is really efficient. Then it can be both moving the car and charging the battery. Not so much when it can't engage and is only acting as a generator (and has conversion and inversion losses between the generator and the battery and the motors).

 

I think I misunderstood what you were saying. Are you referring to direct-drive only? In which case, I would agree, the fixed gear ratio is very much not suitable for engine-only driving. However if we are discussing "generator mode", the 1.5L 103HP engine absolutely has enough HP (even with conversion losses) to spin the generator and send power to the wheels on its own (albeit a sluggish experience).

I am unsure as to what you mean here. GV as in Gasoline Vehicle? Well sure, you could make a mode where only the engine is powering the electric traction motors (no assistance from the reserve battery charge), but that wouldn't make much sense. Do Priuses have a "GV" mode?

 

It requires less than 20hp to move a 4000lb vehicle forward at 55mph. The ICE, powering the generator in HV mode, creates enough electricity to produce up to 60hp from the traction motor. I have no evidence but would happily speculate that the output from the generator can provide brief periods of power greater than 60hp.

It is possible that a call for maximum power, ie: flooring the accelerator pedal, with the battery gauge at zero bars could cause the car to go into a “limp mode” until the condition ceases to exist or is reset.

I haven’t operated the vehicle with zero bars on the battery gauge. With 2 bars I have driven ~100 miles in HV through moderate mountains, I-5 from So Oregon to Redding without a loss of power. Two people, the rear seats folded down and packed to the roof. I have driven 70-80mph with the AC on in 100 degrees and activated HV Charge with no loss of power. The batteries charged from 2 to 10 bars in just over 30 minutes.

Was there any change in your driving habits after you stoped and restarted the car?

 

The 103-hp label doesn't mean much if the thing never runs all-out. The only time it revs up enough to hear over road noise is when I stomp the pedal past the detent when I'm turning onto a highway near a hill and can't see if there's oncoming traffic and care more about getting moving rather than fuel efficiency.

The point is the "power loss" thing actually happens. Maybe some people just imagine it when the engine rev doesn't go along with their accelerator usage, but some is not all.

If the vehicle is already moving, sure. Try ~52 to go from a stop light to 55 on a highway in traffic and still piss off the people behind you because you're accelerating in a not-so-accelerated fashion.

Google says an EV's A/C takes maybe 4 HP, so between that and definite-more-than 50-ish motive HP (I wasn't annoying the people behind me until the thing started coasting instead of accelerating), 60 HP was not enough.

 

But it does. The generator (as Landshark stated above) is capable of outputting 60hp of electric power from the engine's rotation. The engine is capable of moving the vehicle without any battery assistance, it just isn't a sporty ride nor does it make sense to program that in as a drive mode.

I am sure that it does based on the anecdotes posted by Clarity drivers about flashing dashboard warnings et al., however I do not believe that it is related to engine/generator power. Reports vary from empty charge to half charge, and although we can not be certain that they experienced the same cause of power loss, it does seem to point away from HV battery charge.

 

I had an interesting experience very recently that resulted in my first Angry Bee experience.
It was just by happenstance, and it occurred with a significant amount of HV charge (well above 2 bars). The circumstances were this...

1. I was operating in HV mode (with maybe 50% on the charge)
2. I stopped in a parking lot, and kept the car completely "ON", remaining in HV. It was hot and the AC was running.
3. It was quite some time (waiting for wife, shopping). By the time she returned, the vehicle had lost maybe 4-5 miles of EV range, causing a significant lag below the HV Setpoint.
4. I just started to drive away... The car, realizing that the EV range was well below the setpoint, started roaring. It startled me because I don't think I had experienced the bees before, and I didn't expect this...

Of course, I knew immediately that this was the bees... I don't know if there was a lack of power or not (likely not, because I had a good deal of charge), but my knee-jerk reaction was to immediately disengage and re-engage HV mode to reset the setpoint. This cleared up the noise.

I have not tried to repeat this, but I suspect this is a predictable way to "summon the bees" if that's what you want to do.

In hindsight, maybe I should have 'played' while this was happening just to be sure I did not have an actual loss of power. At the moment, I just wanted it to stop !!

 

As you said earlier, you were on a 50mph road, presumably going more than 30mph, when the car “slowed” to 30mph. Later you described a 0-55mph acceleration while expressing concern for the intolerance of the motorists behind you. Must be in LA.

I suspect that you experienced, a somewhat, unique occurrence while operating the vehicle with deeply depleted lithium batteries. The batteries were unable to provide any power and the 60hp from the ICE powered generator was attempting to propel the car while, at the same time, desperately trying to charge the batteries. The car was protecting the batteries, which it most likely is designed to do, under less than ideal conditions.

As I’m sure you are aware, a pedal to the floor full throttle acceleration, requires electricity from both the batteries and the ICE generator. Engine Drive Mode goes into hiding.

Given the circumstances, pushing the accelerator to the floor was probably the worst thing to do.

 

If you mean go into Engine Drive Mode, when you say “supply power directly to the wheels”, higher RPM’s won’t necessarily make that happen.

EDM will engage at speeds of 45mph and above. EDM will engage under low power demands and will remain engaged as long as power demand stays low.

 

Pardon, I meant electrically, not mechanically. Poor choice of words.

 

Thanks. It may be possible to minimize misinterpretations, if we use the officially sanctioned Honda terminology when discussing the vehicle.

But that may not be possible.