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[Tony]

The spiderbus is located on the rear of the battery and runs to the inverter on the bottom. The invertor is the electronics that control your motor. So yeah most probably the spiderbus has been changed.

I really hope for you that the magic charging issue is solved though but I would be sceptical. I was in the same boat about a year ago, I thought it was fixed but it wasn't. Then they changed my battery and it was again "fixed" for 1500-2000km as the BMS was also new. Then they changed the battery again and now I am back with full blown magic charging. Gonna contact my dealer for an update tomorrow as he knows that it is the same again for a few weeks now but still no news on a fix.

Sincerely

Ouch, that is terrible. Sounds very frustrating, and for each time I suppose you are a bit closer to the end of free warranty fixes as well? I hope at least you have another bike or car to use in the meantime. It is sad to see no word from Zero on this, as it seems to be a quite common issue for long time.

So, a quick update. The engineer actually called me today as I told the dealer I would like more infoif possible (nice of him), but I could not take the call, instead we ended up emailing a bit. I guess I should have caught him when he called, because I wrote an email with a lot of questions and he only answered one. 

He emphasized it was NOT the spiderbus that got changed, but the busbar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busbar

Something like this, located under the battery he said. And he wrote in capital letters that noone should attempt to mess with them unless they are professional engineers, as they are dangerous as ****.

That is all I could get out of him, he is a busy guy at the shop I imagine. But, I might be able to catch him later, as I will come by their shop to install a new steering bar as the old one got scratched and bent after the wind tipped the parked MC over a while ago.

So, I suppose we are not much wiser. I guess the only thing left for me to do is hope the best and wait and see.

[MVetter]

Busbar is just how the controller connects to the battery. You can do it with lugs and wires or busbars. Would have no impact on the firmware bug that is Magic Charging. But he's definitely right about not touching it.

[princec]

If there's a calculation made by measuring the voltage and/or current drawn that the firmware is using to dead reckon the Wh consumption and thus remaining battery capacity, then perhaps a wire that's wrongly specced might throw this calculation off by a factor of 2, leading directly to magic charging.

Cas

[MVetter]

I wouldn't blame the cable. I'd blame bad algorithm.

[Demoni]

If there's a calculation made by measuring the voltage and/or current drawn that the firmware is using to dead reckon the Wh consumption and thus remaining battery capacity, then perhaps a wire that's wrongly specced might throw this calculation off by a factor of 2, leading directly to magic charging.

Normally current draw is calculated by using a shunt resistor, any electricity exiting the battery passes through the device. The path across the shunt has a calibrated resistance (very low). This resistance creates a small voltage drop that is calculated by measuring voltage on both sides of the shunt. If you know Voltage and Resistance you can use Ohm's law (V=I/R) to know the current (I).



Battery voltage is dependent on current draw, the higher the load the more the pack voltage will "sag". It is possible to create some sort of algorithm that uses battery cell resistance, measured pack voltage and current draw to estimate what the resting voltage of the pack would be. You can also use the measured current draw to track how much energy has been pulled out of the battery pack. Or combine both those calculated values along with other data to determine state of charge. I have zero idea how Zero calculates their values. Math only works if the data collected is accurate, if an unexpected variable is introduced... garbage in = garbage out.

[Zelidar]

Funny how an "Energica Service Manager" providing technological insights in a Zero Motorcycles forum can become an effective form of advertisement . Many thanks for your inputs Demoni, I'd love if Zero would be more present over here, I personally dislike using Facebook.

[Moto7575]

In the end, I think that Zero's problem is that they indicate a range - it depends so much on how you drive that it will always be wrong unless you always drive the same road, the same way. But if you move from city to highway, or from a cool driving to a more aggressive driving you will double the range.

If you did this with a normal car, depending on how you drive you would need 5 liters/100km to 10 liters/100 km. They should have limited themselves to a basic gauge - 100% to 0% full, and maybe indicating the size of the reserve (0.8 Kwh or 10 kilometers) - or let you enter the target consumption (so that you can put the number correct for the CURRENT ride, not the average of the past rides).

[Skidz]

If you know Voltage and Resistance you can use Ohm's law (V=I/R) to know the current (I).

Don't want to be a formula-nazi here, but Ohm's law is U=IxR where U is voltage, I is amperage and R is resistance. Just sayin'

[Fred]

  Good spot. Maybe Zero made the same mistake during their range calculation.

[electrictwowheeler]

It seems to me that the estimated range function works fine. The range goes down on the highway and up in city driving. Up when you are going downhill and down when you are going uphill. Just like my gas cars and my Spark EV. The problem is the SOC which the computer uses to figure estimated range.

[princec]

It also bases whether to cripple the engine based on SOC as well, it seems.

Cas

[noyesknifer]

Yep, if it didn't substantially cripple the motor based on SOC this magic charging problem would turn into a minor inconvenience.  Most people who get this problem have already ridden thousands of miles/kilometers and already understand more or less how far they can go on a single charge. When the bike reaches 0% it can only go 35 miles per hour.. makes the bike extremely dangerous (especially on the freeway).  Harley doesn't substantially cripple their motors on the Livewire, so why can't Zero?

[princec]

Well, physics is physics and I think that really HD have just got a slightly larger battery and draw a level amount of power right down to the point where they can't draw that level of power, and that's what they call empty and just shut the bike off very quickly after that. Zero on the other hand draws as much juice as it can get across the voltage range, and they've decided to let it just keep getting slower and slower past before the voltage drops so low they have to curtail it significantly to avoid damaging something. Energica use this tactic as well but tbh I think I prefer HD's philosophy - always give the same reliable power and at the point you can't, call it a day. I ride my Zero in Street mode essentially to avoid the disappointment of Sport mode getting slower and slower as the battery discharges.

Cas

[MVetter]

Or, the way the H-D engineers designed the pack and inverter is fairly unique and very well thought-out. I suspect there may be an extra 1-2kWh padding outside the usable range they just don't let the user access, and have an inverter that handles much higher amp requests at the bottom end very well. It's also the only battery pack out of all the full sized bikes that is just 1 big series. There are no parallel packs. Like Zero is famously 28s4p. The Livewire just Xs (X being however many cells there are in series, it's not publicly known). That has an impact as well.

[princec]

I had thought that having just a single series would lend itself to voltage sag under heavy demand and apparently that's alleviated by parallel configurations... but HD are clearly more cunning than at first they seemed. Might be something also to do with how their motor draws/makes power, being a high-revving high-voltage thing, perhaps you'd only notice voltage sag when you rev it out at the top end which very few people are apt to do for any length of time. Oh to be a fly on the wall of the engineering meetings.

Cas