How / can you check battery SOH ?

[tsedge]

That's fine as a rough guide but as range is temperature and weather dependent, you need to average out and try to do fair comparisons.

 

[Rolfe]

What it displays and what you actually get are different. The displayed range depends on many factors.

I do a regular trip from north London to wales on the M4. The first time I did it I can get to the bridge from 100% from my house and use 60% to the bridge from London so 40% left and this is just about enough to get to my final destination but I always charge when it gets under 20%.

This is how I can keep tabs on my battery capacity can I still get to the bridge with 40% left in a few years time

In the same weather. You won't get there on 40% in winter, but come summer it will come back up again.

 

[Kithmo]

Too many variables to base SOH on range IMO.

 

[AndyL61]

I agree . Only way is to measure with software, anything else is a guess.

 

[MG4London]

The software can be manipulated to show it is still with 70% capacity before the 7 year warranty runs out.

But if we can prove it is actually less than 79% then the warranty says they have to replace the battery.

I hope the batteries will last more than 7 years time will tell

 

[Alb]

You may find this story about Tesla interesting:

Tesla exaggerated EV range so much that drivers thought cars were broken

Inundated with complaints, Tesla created "Diversion Team" to cancel appointments.

arstechnica.com

 

[Rolfe]

And yet I have read a bunch of Tesla drivers on another forum (not a Tesla forum, just a general thread on EVs) saying that this has not been their experience.

 

[AndyL61]

What annoys me about especially ice drivers who are anti EV always love to point out that EV's never do the range we're told they will do . They don't mention that they probably never achieve the mpg which is advertised for their vehicles they just accept that. When I got my MG4 , I didn't expect I would get the WLTP figure but it is at least a good comparison figure against other cars. To my surprise I am getting beyond WLTP during the summer months , but accept that this won't be the case when the weather cools down. I will probably swap my car at 3 to 4 years old so shouldn't have to worry about battery degradation. However if you believe the pro EVers then these batteries will outlive the cars anyway. They say 10 years minimum. The good news is eventually these older EV batteries can be reperposed or even recycled which should hopefully satisfy some of the negativity towards the EV revolution. So let's enjoy our EV's and hope that battery degradation is not as bad as the anti EV brigade believe. Regardless of what they think EV's are here to stay after all the car industry and worldwide governments have already invested billions into the concept so it isn't going to disappear anytime soon. Battery technology will continue to improve and everyone will get used to not being reliant on fossil fuels.

 

[Rolfe]

I always had an eye on my projected range in my Golf. I knew that with steady A-road driving in summer I might get 430 miles from a tank, and once or twice I even got over 450. But if I was growling through bad traffic that would drop considerably and I'd be lucky to get 400 miles. In winter it would drop to around 380 miles.

It was also very prone to over-optimistic estimates when the tank was quite full, if I'd been driving economically - far more so than the MG4. I saw a projected range of 550 miles once, but of course I knew that was fiction. The thing is, though, that VW never advertised the car as having any particular range between fill-ups. They advertised mpg, and everybody knows that's also fiction, as Andy says it's merely useful to compare cars, because all the fictions are worked out the same way.

If we treated EVs the same way, we'd be moaning that the car was advertised as doing 3.8 miles/KWh and we're only getting 3.3! And we'd know that that's because these figures as about as reliable as manufacturers' mpg claims, and we've only got our own right feet to blame anyway.

I suppose the fixation on range is because battery capacity has historically not matched what a petrol car could do on a tank of petrol, but this is becoming no longer the case. In my memory my first Fiesta could only go about 250 miles on a tank of petrol, and there are plenty EVs that will do that and more.