2016 FFE 12v Battery issue

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xman

New member
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
2
I had a 2014 FFE before and that worked great without any issue. The lease ended last year and I got another FFE 2016. The issue started about 2 weeks ago that one morning I got to the car, it is totally dead. Originally I had no idea what was going on and thought it might just have to be towed in to the dealership. After googling and reading around, it looks like I can jump start the car. So I got it jump started and it was alive again. But since then, the car is having problems on starting up. During these 2 weeks, I am having to jump start it 3 or 4 times. I noticed I can keep the car on the charger and I will be able to start it. But, if I leave it standing for a while, it will have difficulties. Since this is a new car just with about 12 months battery life, it's hard to believe the battery is going dead on me. It might be some electronic system issue that got the battery running? I am scheduling a service with dealership and they don't have anything until further out in the month. Hopefully, they would be able to get this figure out.
 
xman said:
I had a 2014 FFE before and that worked great without any issue. The lease ended last year and I got another FFE 2016. The issue started about 2 weeks ago that one morning I got to the car, it is totally dead. Originally I had no idea what was going on and thought it might just have to be towed in to the dealership. After googling and reading around, it looks like I can jump start the car. So I got it jump started and it was alive again. But since then, the car is having problems on starting up. During these 2 weeks, I am having to jump start it 3 or 4 times. I noticed I can keep the car on the charger and I will be able to start it. But, if I leave it standing for a while, it will have difficulties. Since this is a new car just with about 12 months battery life, it's hard to believe the battery is going dead on me. It might be some electronic system issue that got the battery running? I am scheduling a service with dealership and they don't have anything until further out in the month. Hopefully, they would be able to get this figure out.

My car did exactly the same thing as yours, and it was a bad 12V battery. Replaced under warranty by the dealer, and all has been good since.

Regarding having to wait until later in the month for the dealer to work on your car, I'd raise a stink about that. Your car is under warranty. At a minimum they should be giving you a free loaner while they take your car to fix it. If they really cared, they'd swap the battery now, and then schedule a follow-on appointment later in the month to make sure that the swap actually fixed the problem. Right now, your car isn't really driveable, since the 12V is necessary to be able to start. What happens when the 12V dies at the grocery store, or someplace else, and you can't hook up to a charger to get going again?

Keith
 
I always kept a portable jump starter battery unit in my FFE just in case.
The newer LiOn types are small enough to fit in the glove compartment and also double as a USB power source for charging cell phones, etc.
 
xman your only hope of the dealer figuring it out is if your 12V goes dead all the time. What's most likely happening is when you turn the car off something isn't shutting down. IMHO it's a major design flaw of the FFE. There's no one thing that controls access to the 12V battery when the car is off. The computer simply sends a shutdown command to all the modules and relies on those modules to turn themselves off. There is no data logging (error codes) when something doesn't shut down as it's supposed to so there is literally no way to trouble shoot it unless you catch it in the act. IE the dealer has their equipment hooked up and can see the excess current draw when the car is supposedly off. They will check to make sure the current draw on the battery is less than 50mA and if it isn't they start pulling fuses until the current draw goes away. My 5 month ordeal with this is detailed here: http://www.myfocuselectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3812 I believe it only got resolved because my intermittent problem became a daily problem. In the end it killed the 12V battery but that wasn't replaced until they had finally fixed it. It sounds like yours is less intermittent than mine was and hopefully is easy to find. Keep us posted and let us know which module they replace. Oh yeah what NightHawk said! I don't leave home without my lithium jump starter. Just don't keep it in the back. you can't open the hatch when the battery is dead (another design flaw) which might make it difficult to impossible to get to your jump starter.
 
triangles said:
Just don't keep it in the back. you can't open the hatch when the battery is dead (another design flaw) which might make it difficult to impossible to get to your jump starter.
Yes watch out for keeping emergency stuff in the back.
I experimented in case power was off, to open the driver's side door with the manual key in the FOB.
I could get some access to the back by taking the back seats down, but its easier to keep the LiON jump starter under a seat or in the glove compartment.
 
The issue became worse over the time and I eventually got the car to the dealership last Friday. It was straight forward to replace the 12V battery but it took them over the weekend and 2 more days to finally get it back to me last night. They didn't say what exactly was draining the battery but things are looking fine over night.
 
One anecdote I can offer for my 2017 FFE, is that the DCDC converter voltage usually sits around 14.7-14.8VDC per the FORScan Lite app (haven't confirmed yet via multimeter) ... that's around 2.45-2.46V/cell.

From http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_the_lead_acid_battery that appears to be at the very upper limit of tolerance for float charges. Wonder if the battery would last longer with a ~14.2-14.5V target?
I haven't looked yet, but does the FFE stock battery have service caps for adding water?
 
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