[JoeReal]

We know that many Tesla owners have reported losing about 5 miles of range per day by simply parking their car in their garage.

I am curious as to how much range losses per day of the Chevy Bolt when you simply park it unplugged in a constant temperature garage and it initially have a full charge.

Any of the owners here can report yet?

 

[stuart22]

Don;t have a Bolt, but do have a Spark EV. It does not suffer from vampire losses while parked. Can't think why GM would have the Bolt any different.

 

[bro1999]

We know that many Tesla owners have reported losing about 5 miles of range per day by simply parking their car in their garage.

I am curious as to how much range losses per day of the Chevy Bolt when you simply park it unplugged in a constant temperature garage and it initially have a full charge.

Any of the owners here can report yet?

No losses observed yet. Hasn't been super cold in MD (above freezing since I got it), but no losses of any kind so far.

 

[JoeReal]

No losses observed yet. Hasn't been super cold in MD (above freezing since I got it), but no losses of any kind so far.

Excellent, so it is better than the Tesla cars in this respect.

 

[JoeReal]

Don;t have a Bolt, but do have a Spark EV. It does not suffer from vampire losses while parked. Can't think why GM would have the Bolt any different.

This is Excellent then. I did notice some vampiric losses on my 2017 Volt though. I lose about 1 mile per day of range while parked and unplugged. So I always leave my car plugged if parked on our garage or driveway.

 

[Loboc]

Tesla has improved on vampire losses over the years. I'd be surprised if it's still 5mi/day.

Since Volt (or any car with active sensors for proximity keys, bluetooth, telemetry etc.) uses power to be on standby, there are some losses. Bolt is probably no exception.

Excellent, so it is better than the Tesla cars in this respect.

Probably need to compare a 2017 Tesla to a 2017 Bolt to be sure. And not just anecdotal. Actual testing.

 

[gjm3]

We know that many Tesla owners have reported losing about 5 miles of range per day by simply parking their car in their garage.

I am curious as to how much range losses per day of the Chevy Bolt when you simply park it unplugged in a constant temperature garage and it initially have a full charge.

Any of the owners here can report yet?

You might want to watch Ladogaboy's YouTube account here of his 'failed' road trip in his Bolt EV. To save (a lot!) of time, see the first couple of minutes of Ladogaboy's part 3 Youtube videos. It seems he left his Bolt stuck in the cold with a blown tire by the side of the road up in the snowy mountains north of Los Angeles for a couple of days without any noticeable loss of range.

 

[Ladogaboy]

Vampiric losses seem to be close to nil.

Granted, I think the coldest my Bolt EV got was the high 20s F, but two days without charging showed very little in the way of losses.

 

[Ladogaboy]

You might want to watch Ladogaboy's YouTube account here of his 'failed' road trip in his Bolt EV. To save (a lot!) of time, see the first couple of minutes of Ladogaboy's part 3 Youtube videos. It seems he left his Bolt stuck in the cold with a blown tire by the side of the road up in the snowy mountains north of Los Angeles for a couple of days without any noticeable loss of range.

Hah! Jinx!

 

[Sean Nelson]

Since Volt (or any car with active sensors for proximity keys, bluetooth, telemetry etc.) uses power to be on standby, there are some losses. Bolt is probably no exception.

My understanding of how the Bolt and other electric vehicles operate is that the high voltage battery is disconnected when the car is turned "off". The power to run the car while off comes from the 12V battery. So all those bells and whistles won't drain power from the battery which reduces its range, at least not directly.

Now when you turn the car on the high voltage battery will be used to recharge the 12V battery, so I guess you can count that as an indirect loss. But the capacity of the 12V battery is so small compared to the high voltage battery that I'd be very surprised if there was any significant impact.

 

[somms]

My understanding of how the Bolt and other electric vehicles operate is that the high voltage battery is disconnected when the car is turned "off".

Not sure about the Bolt but on the Volt in certain situations even with the vehicle OFF, the High Voltage Battery Thermal System can request to turn ON 3-phase alternating current AC compressor with on-board inverter that takes High Voltage direct current from the vehicle's High Voltage Battery and inverts it to alternating current for the motor to help maintain the battery temperature. This would only occur when it is very hot outside so for the most part it is true that any 'vampire' losses on the Bolt should be very low.

 

[Ladogaboy]

Not sure about the Bolt but on the Volt in certain situations even with the vehicle OFF, the High Voltage Battery Thermal System can request to turn ON 3-phase alternating current AC compressor with on-board inverter that takes High Voltage direct current from the vehicle's High Voltage Battery and inverts it to alternating current for the motor to help maintain the battery temperature. This would only occur when it is very hot outside so for the most part it is true that any 'vampire' losses on the Bolt should be very low.

This is a great point. If we in California have a mild winter (nothing below ~ 20 F), we might not be able to see what the Bolt's battery conditioning is like until summer. It could be that excessive heat (> 105 F) has more of an effect on the Bolt's battery conditioning than sub-freezing temperatures. Obviously, some places that get really cold could start to track the Bolt's battery conditioning in winter conditions first.

 

[madbrain]

All battery types suffer from self discharge losses, whether plugged in or not, at various rates. The GOM algorithm may or may not reflect that. If anything, zero charge losses shown on the Bolt over time, or any BEV, would be highly suspicious to me. I would expect at least some kind of loss regardless with a car that just sits. Could be that self-discharge loss is just something that Chevy isn't trying to estimate in their algorithm right now.

 

[Ladogaboy]

I'd be really surprised if it weren't calculated in. The range estimator displays what it believes to be the battery's current state of charge.

From a recent video I watched (electrek's interview with a GM rep), it sounds like the battery just disconnects when the power is off. In that way, it would discharge at about the same rate as any Li battery you charged up just set on a shelf.

 

[madbrain]

I'd be really surprised if it weren't calculated in. The range estimator displays what it believes to be the battery's current state of charge.

From a recent video I watched (electrek's interview with a GM rep), it sounds like the battery just disconnects when the power is off. In that way, it would discharge at about the same rate as any Li battery you charged up just set on a shelf.

That doesn't bode well, then 100% of the LiOn batteries I have left charged on shelves for more than a few weeks have had 0 charge available the next time I tried to use them. Many of them couldn't ever accept a significant charge again, and had to be tossed, too.
I try to buy devices that don't use use LiOn whenever as possible - I use Eneloops AA/AAAs LSD (low self discharge) and find those to really still be usable 6 months later as advertised. Unfortunately, a lot of devices don't take AAs/AAAs anymore as they have shrunk too much and compactness appears to be the #1 criteria these days in devices.

I think it's likely that the self discharge loss is estimated, indeed, both in the Teslas and Bolt. One would have to try to discharge the battery and measure the available charge over time to figure out if the GOM estimate drops are accurate.

 

[Ladogaboy]

Wow. That's pretty sad. If I use my camera batteries as reference, I've had them sit on a shelf for six months, and they still had 80-90% charge when I loaded them back in the camera.

 

[Jeff N]

That doesn't bode well, then 100% of the LiOn batteries I have left charged on shelves for more than a few weeks have had 0 charge available the next time I tried to use them. Many of them couldn't ever accept a significant charge again, and had to be tossed, too.
I try to buy devices that don't use use LiOn whenever as possible - I use Eneloops AA/AAAs LSD (low self discharge) and find those to really still be usable 6 months later as advertised.

Lithium ion battery cells are generally good about not self-discharging compared to other rechargeable battery types. If they start with a half charge or more they should not dangerously drain themselves for a couple of years. They self-discharge at a much slower rate (2-5% per month) than normal Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) cells (30% per month) which have been the most common consumer rechargeable AA-size batteries, at least until recently. NiMH was used for Toyota Prius-style hybrid packs until just very recently.

Are you sure you were seeing self-discharge issues with Lithium ion cells and not conventional NiMH cells?

There are also now low self-discharge NiMH cells available like the Panasonic Eneloop brand that you mentioned. They have self-discharge rates of around 2% per month.

 

[hellsop]

That doesn't bode well, then 100% of the LiOn batteries I have left charged on shelves for more than a few weeks have had 0 charge available the next time I tried to use them. Many of them couldn't ever accept a significant charge again, and had to be tossed, too.

Which suggests that they were defective when you put them on the shelf. Lithium Ion batteries are months or years old when you buy them. Even if the packaging suggest manufacturing was only weeks ago, the age of the cells inside might be far, far older. And those are generally pretty good. Non-defective Lithium Ion batteries lose about 5% over the first 24 hours, but then should hold a charge for YEARS, losing maybe 1-2% per month.

 

[Sean Nelson]

That doesn't bode well, then 100% of the LiOn batteries I have left charged on shelves for more than a few weeks have had 0 charge available the next time I tried to use them.

I use Eneloops AA/AAAs LSD (low self discharge) and find those to really still be usable 6 months later as advertised.

I'm a big proponent of Eneloops too. If there's one thing that Eneloops should tell you, it's that not all batteries are made equal. Conventional NiMH batteries are terrible at holding charge - yet Eneloops, which also use NiMH chemistry, are much better. So you can not generalize what a given battery is going to do based on the performance of some other brand of battery.

And the same is certainly true of Li-Ion batteries. The batteries in the Bolt EV have been specifically designed for automotive applications, and that includes the very common use case where the car is left idle for lengthy periods of time. So trying to scare people about the battery's performance based on experience with consumer equipment falls somewhere between misinformed and disingenuous.