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[Richard230]

Zero’s customer communications are poor, and the strategy of paying to swap whole subsystems does not scale nor does it help them arrive at a scaleable strategy.

Understatement of the year, IMO. I don't care if Zero adds active thermal management and CCS, I'd never consider another one due to the extremely horrible customer service. Energica has been the exact opposite in ownership experience -- the product works (PM me about my two SR's...), and the company gets back to my dealer rep within a day with answers. We've seen so many Zero dealers drop out in my state because they take forever to pay for warranty work.

That is what happens when you don't feel any real competition breathing down your neck.

[caza]

Hopefully things are getting better. When I went in to order my new charger from my local dealership they told me that Zero has been way more responsive and helpful in the past 6 months and that they had a lot of trouble before that. I ordered the part and it arrived 2 business days later so I can't complain on my end, but my problem was relatively minor.

Hopefully harley, lightning, and soon ducati jumping into the space will help kick them into gear so they can start acting like a professional automaker.

[togo]

kaza> ... my local dealership they told me that Zero has been way more responsive and helpful in the past 6 months and that they had a lot of trouble before that. ...

Hey, NEW2elec, any chance you could change this thread's subject to something less trollish?

[NEW2elec]

It's so hard to type and have things read with the correct intended emotion so let me be clear the reply isn't angry and I'll just address it as clearly as I can.

First the term Troll gets thrown around a little too much.  To me a troll, in this forum, would be someone who hates the idea of an Electric motorcycle or any other EV and has no interest in getting one or learning about them.   They would complain or belittle the products and users with no intent to do anything but put out negative comments to get under people's skin.

I own 2 electric motorcycles so I'm a full fledged EV club member.  I have my experiences and my opinions based on my use and the information I take in form different media sources.  It may be a press release or a pro blogger or a user video or forum post.  As I've always stated I'm no EE or even a tech of any kind but I feel I have a valid opinion being in the club and using the products for years now.

This post and the title came from my use and reports and user complaints about their EV's battery. 
So quick recap the woman on the video clearly shows Tesla changed their charging best practice information when she had a problem.
That information was not out at the time of sale and was only mentioned after she had a problem.  She was told what she was doing could have caused permanent capacity loss or computer recognized battery capacity even though she was doing what they said to do with the Model S.
So Tesla changed their recommendations post sale.

Zero did the same thing with their recommendations post sale.  From leave it plugged all the time to charge it up and then unplug it. The big guys in the club say keep it between 20-80%, which may be the most ideal but I know the Zero's charger is still pulling higher amps at that SOC and you have to just pull the plug from the wall getting a bit of an arch when you do.

Nissan who has sold more EVs on the road than anyone is still dealing with rapidgate for their 2018 leafs and people have had massive capacity loss in the older Leaf batteries due we're told to no active heat management.  All post sale.  I feel it's fair to expect a ready for market product to have major problems fixed before offered to the public, maybe unrealistic but still falls under "should".

So the three biggest names in EVs have all changed their recommendations post sale after real world use shows problems.  There are people out there who are experts on these types of batteries and I have to assume these companies hired them right?  I mean who else do they hire?  But all three changed their best practices recommendations  so my conclusion was that no one knows what will happen to these batteries in the real world until they are out in the real world and not in controlled laboratories.  Because if they knew then what they know and recommend now they would have said it pre sale.

In the interest of good will I will change the title to include the word "maybe" so it better reflects my thoughts based on the above examples and let others come to their own conclusions.

I want these products to succeed and one way to do that in the long term is be honest and point out flaws when they occur in the interest of improvement.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

“No one knows anything” is hardly descriptive of the situation, though.

You have a new field of engineering application, where some testing yields a model, and then year by year the models evolve and become more nuanced.

Your title just doesn’t give credit where it is due.

There are plenty of criticisms worth expressing, including the lack of informative insight on the part of the vendors. They certainly lack candor that can be an important ingredient of a trusting relationship.

I’ll offer a candidate title that feels fairer to me:
“So maybe everyone is still learning about battery charging best practices”

[NEW2elec]

Ok out of respect I changed "anything" to "enough". 
But you have to agree these recommendations caused or could cause pretty big problems for owners and I think people who are experts and professionals should be held to a higher standard and receive due criticisms along with deserved accolades.

The school nurse who puts a band aid on a cut gets a pass if it scars later.
The Doctor that messes up gets sued.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

Thank you. That’s a better title.

I was just wondering how much professional discussion happens among those designing EV powertrains about the BMS and charging regimes.

There are definitely some academic papers, but compared to other fields, this area is highly industrialized and probably proprietary. The SAE or other professional society might hold a SIG group, but I’m not aware of those.

There are also some inherent limitations to knowledge transfer between engineers and companies, such as that the cell chemistry has specific outcomes. But basically every vehicle has different conditions.

Still, I suspect that these engineers do not engage in as much knowledge sharing as one might expect. And maybe this field has selected and bred a professional culture that inhibits this.

[Doug S]

I have to admit when I first saw this topic, I thought of the quote attributed to Mark Twain (which he never actually wrote but it's still great): “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

I'm with Brian. The manufacturers know a lot about their batteries, but not enough to say how they're going to behave in every single circumstance. And they have liability concerns -- if they guarantee battery life, everybody who gets less life than that is going to want a new battery pack. So our batteries are guaranteed for a fairly safe number, and "rated" for a more realistic number.

Testing is problematical, too. The only way to measure battery cycle life is by cycling several battery packs until failure. You don't want to cycle them at too high of a current, or you'll invalidate your testing, so let's say you can cycle them 10 times per day. If they're rated for a minimum of 2500 cycles, some are going to last for 10,000 cycles, which will take 2.7 years. So by the time you have your answer, you're two generations behind.

[togo]

I apologize for calling the incendiary subject line trollish.

Thank you for changing it.

[NEW2elec]

   Your welcome and forgiven togo.

I hope after watching the whole video everyone feels 100% confident that this type of learned lack of battery capacity will never be included in a firmware update and kills 20% of of their usable range when they follow best practices and they limit their SOC to 80% so they then can't charge to 100% even if they want to. 

But remember someone at Tesla thought putting that type of logic in sure was a good idea.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

There’s no certain conclusion of any kind from this video except that you and others like to jump to conclusions, and that the messaging around these decisions is poor.

[NEW2elec]

Fact 1. Woman's car can't charge to 100% after only charging it to70% since new.  Video shows other people complaining about the same problem.
Fact 2.  Woman shows tweet from Elon Musk saying charging 30%-80% is best for long term.
Fact 3.  Car gets a hard reset and shows the full range again.
Fact 4.  Video at 3:40 states from Tesla if she had tried to drive more than the software limited 260 miles range the car would have "shut down" to save the battery.  The car got to this state because she limited her charging to 70% and no other reason.

The software was set up to "learn" a false range based on seeing the SOC at 70% all the time and recalculating the full range as such.

The battery was fine and healthy the whole time but the problem was caused solely from the woman charging to the previous recommended best practice 70% SOC and the car's computer interpreting that as max capacity. 

Please explain in detail where there is a different conclusion that can be arrived at from these facts.

[Doug S]

...that this type of learned lack of battery capacity will never be included in a firmware update and kills 20% of of their usable range when they follow best practices and they limit their SOC to 80% so they then can't charge to 100% even if they want to. 

But remember someone at Tesla thought putting that type of logic in sure was a good idea.

What Tesla did was limit the charge available so they could sell (IIRC) a 80kWh battery pack as a 60kWh battery pack. It was cheaper for Tesla to build only one battery pack than have another assembly line for the smaller one. Even Tesla now admits it was a bad idea.

There's always going to have to be SOME trust of the manufacturer. We're very much at their mercy in terms of what they COULD do in firmware, if they wanted to do it. And there's a bit of cross-purposes at work too: We're concerned almost entirely with performance, the manufacturer is concerned almost entirely with liability. But if they don't build product that satisfies their customers, they're going to go out of business very quickly.

Why would they want to limit our battery capacity to 80% of "true" capacity, anyhow? They know how concerned all of their customers are with range, and what a stumbling block range is to wider acceptance of EVs in general. Their definition of "best charging practices" has moved a tiny bit toward the "longer battery life" end of the spectrum recently, but just a tiny bit.

[NEW2elec]

Quote:  We're concerned almost entirely with performance, the manufacturer is concerned almost entirely with liability.

100% agree.  This idea of well meaning learning from an actual old battery what it's new real range is would help customers "of older cars"
I don't think that they ever wanted to limit her range (Model 3 not an S) for her healthy new battery with this "learning" software.

But appears to be a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing or in this case saying.

The guys making the software figure people will charge to 100% and it won't trigger this "learned" safety limiting feature.  They know what is best for their system but that information didn't get out to the customers and they had to find out what is best to do after a problem occurred.

The woman going off admittedly Model S recommendations "shot herself in the foot" so to speak and caused her own range limit by trying to do what she thought and was told (Model S) was best for her car.

Now this isn't just some woman she's in pretty big with Tesla which was how she got Musk to tweet her back and I think they would have bent over backwards to help her in any way she wanted due to her following on social media.

This whole post was a wake up warning from her on her video and me as a gut reaction to "how could this happen" it's like finding out changing your oil every 3000 miles actually hurts your car and isn't good for it after all.
The learned software range is just another new factor in the troubleshooting process if one finds oneself with a battery that won't fully charge.
 Again it may only ever be in a Tesla Model 3 but it did happen.

[kcfoxie]

What Tesla did was limit the charge available so they could sell (IIRC) a 80kWh battery pack as a 60kWh battery pack. It was cheaper for Tesla to build only one battery pack than have another assembly line for the smaller one. Even Tesla now admits it was a bad idea.

It was the 40kWh pack, they never made one "due to demand."

Why would they want to limit our battery capacity to 80% of "true" capacity, anyhow?

Because people expect cars to last 8-15 years before needing major services (rebuild trans/engine, etc). This is how the Volt's got the longing running "no loss in range" award, they put a larger than advertised battery in the vehicle and limited the amount of user available capacity so that a the vehicle and battery aged the drivability expectation is met. BMW clearly stated only 18.8kWh of their 24.0kWh battery was usable, for the same reason: battery longevity.

I'd personally only buy cars that work like the Volt/BMW than Tesla.