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2017 High Voltage Battery health

664 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  phattyduck
Hello Volt afficianados. I have had my fully loaded 2017 Volt Premier for 6 years. It now has 32K miles on the Odometer, 90% of which were electric miles. I am trying to evaluate how well my high voltage battery/charging system is holding up after 6 years and have a question about the 10 yellow/green charge cells on the left side of the speedometer. When I charge the car to "Fully Charged", all of these 10 cells turn yellow/green. Then, as I drive, the cells decriment one by one until the yellow/green color goes away in all of them and I am left with 10 empty cells and a Zero charge. Assuming driving at a steady speed and level elevation on a constant 65 degree day, would these cells decriment at a steady rate? Let me try and ask the question another way: If I were to drive on a hypothetical flat road in 65 degree weather at a steady 30 miles per hour and the first cell empties after, lets say, 6 miles, does that mean that the second through tenth cell will continue to decriment at the same rate--in this example every 6 miles or would the rate of decriment vary even though all the external variables remain exactly the same?

I am trying to use the above test as a way of evaluating the health/strength of my high voltage battery. If there is another better way to do that, I am all ears. Thank you for your collective wisdom\Rbon
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Why not just look at the trip energy consumption display?
I have a Gen1, so I am unsure how to look at it on your Gen2. In mine you press the leaf button and the center display will show how many miles you drove, how much fuel consumed, etc... (unfortunately the 2011s did not show the kW-h of power consumption... this came in 2013 I think). Yours definitely shows the number of kW-h consumed. Compare the energy consumed to what a new Volt's capacity is to determine if your capacity has degraded. Someone here will tell you what the original capacity was (or wikipedia will tell you as well...)

Regarding battery health, get the MGV app and an OBD dongle and look at the cell imbalance when full and when empty. Plenty of threads here to say what is good and what is bad.

Other apps will also report to you the battery capacity in terms of A-h. There is a chart floating around on this forum that lists what the new capacity of the battery should be.
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