Looking for others with 12V battery problems for class action lawsuit

LOL

 

Doesn't a Prius HV-to-12V-bus inverter have a similar capacity?

 

Did you forget to take your meds? You do realize that the problem OP is presenting is not enough charge, not too much charge. Also have you ever tried to get a car owner with a busy life to do more for their car beyond what they usually do? I've been recommending that all Prius do a thorough recharge of their 12v with a legit smart charger that can go up to at least 10 or 20 amps in the darkest parts of winter because the weak sauce amp level won't ever have enough time to for the car to charge it for them and I can't even get people to do that much. And then they call me in Winter because their 12v battery is dead, as if I haven't said anything. And here we are again with an OP wanting to file a lawsuit because that's obviously easier than putting a 12v charger on your 12v every once in a while, right? And then we got you jousting a nonsensical windmill of the dangers of people overcharging their 12v with barely 5amps of charge the Gen5 can produce and claiming that too much 12v idscharge and not enough recharge isn't a substantial design flaw in EVs and Hybrids in the first couple decades. The insanity of it all!!!

 

It has the ability to do that theoretically, but designers of Hybrids and EVs have chronically underestimated the needs of a 12v battery when it become overly discharged and have opted for a steady low amp charge in the name of efficiency, rather than a variable amp charge in the name of reliability that can quickly recharge a 12v if it's near dead...

 

Why is such a simple thing so hard for you to understand? OP’s battery failed because it was already drained when the car was bought. The dealer is required to charge the battery before it is sold, but they didn’t.

Any car battery will fail if you don’t drive the car, regardless of the make and model year.

Battery maintenance during predelivery service | National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

 

Yes but up until the advent of hybrids and EVs in recent decades if you had a dead 12v from lack of use you'd get a jump start and drive the car around for 20minutes and that high amp alternator would put enough charge on your 12v so it worked normall again. With the weak sauce charge the DC to DC inverter provides a 12v in most Hybrids and EVs you're looking at keeping the car on for 12 hours not 20 minutes to get back to a reasonable level of charge. Fortunately Tesla and hybrid vehicle makers are finally getting tired of the complaints and taking steps to address this problem. Of course doesn't seem like Toyota has done a dang thing to deal with this problem yet because they suck at computer code and don't want to invest in getting better at it.

 

DC–DC converter, yes. Of course, it does.

 

Any battery in any car that is fully drained must be manually charged with a battery maintainer. There will also be a loss of capacity due to sulfation, and the battery maintainer can partially repair it.

Even the Uplus AGM battery I bought warned in its user manual that the battery must be fully charged before it is installed if the SOC is below about 85% (12.7 V open circuit). Moreover, it says the current limit should be 0.15C (7.5 A for 50 Ah capacity). So, the real world is not that simple that you can put 100 A into a dead battery, and it will be OK afterward.

You are oversimplifying battery maintenance. You are also thinking that the battery problems in Gen 4/Gen 5 Prius are too common (they are not) and that older cars do not have battery problems (they do).

 

I had understood that my Gen3 Prii (2010 and 2012) had variable rate charging, significantly improved over Gen2, though not to the level you want.

Did this disappear in Gen4-5?

 

Yes, it can charge at way more than 5 amps! The issue is the logic that backs off the charging to save a little bit of energy and ends up leaving the battery at 50% or less state of charge. And then the car has a significant draw on the 12 volt battery, even when it’s shut off.

14.3 volts will not destroy the 12 volt battery! After unplugging a similar sensor my Ford F150 alternator charges at 14.3 volts all the time and the battery lasted 6 years.

Here’s a video with lots of Prius 12 volt system detail including a demonstration of peak charging over 40 amps into the Prius 12 volt battery in “Ready” mode (at the 16 minute mark).

 

40 A corresponds to a 0.9C charge rate for a 45-Ah battery. That is way higher than what my UPlus AGM battery manual recommends (0.1–0.15C).

From Google:

Charging a lead–acid battery too fast forces excess electrical energy to convert into extreme heat and gas instead of chemical potential. This rapid charging leads to internal damage, irreversible capacity loss, deformed lead plates, and a significant risk of explosion due to combustible hydrogen and oxygen gas release.

 

Gen 4 and Gen 5 have a 12-V battery management system (BMS) that controls the DC–DC converter voltage using a battery sensor and computer logic. The system is virtually identical in Gen 4 and Gen 5.