OBD2 Bluetooth Scanner

[Millpower]

Anyone had experience with an OBD2 Bluetooth diagnostic scanner on an MG ZS EV using Android. What type of scanner works?

 

[tomhanman]

Thanks for the links, I'll give it a try.

Glad you got success with Car Scanner.

Peter, an app reads all or as much data from the canbus as it can. Although there are indeed a load of seemingly obvious useless categories, each car is different and trying to ignore certain areas would probably lead to omissions (although not emissions).

With the apps you can personalise your displays and therefore never again see the maf, map, or O₂ levels of your EV.

92.3%, just out of interest what version year and mileage?

Ours is 19 months, 25,000 kms 70kWh and supposedly 99.4% SoH.

Cheers,
Tom.

 

[fred12345]

Anyone had experience with an OBD2 Bluetooth diagnostic scanner on an MG ZS EV using Android. What type of scanner works?

I'm completely new to the car and to all this stuff...I used one of these

https://a.aliexpress.com/_Evzt2O7

See my posts above. I managed to connect it to Car Scanner on android phone.

92.3%, just out of interest what version year and mileage?

Ours is 19 months, 25,000 kms 70kWh and supposedly 99.4% soh.

Mine is ex-lease car registered in march 2022 standard range Trophy, new version of ZS, with almost 70,000km / 43,000 miles in the clock. No idea how they charged and drove it before me, I so far charged twice on slow 2kW charger...

 

[Gadget Geek]

With that kind of mileage, I would imagine it was a lot of rapid DC charging, which would also account for the soh.

 

[fred12345]

With that kind of mileage, I would imagine it was a lot of rapid DC charging, which would also account for the soh.

any idea if it improves with slow charge from now on or that's that, no improvement possible ?

 

[Coulomb]

if it improves with slow charge from now on or that's that, no improvement possible ?

It doesn't improve, unfortunately.

 

[tomhanman]

I'm going to disagree a little with Gadgetgeek. 21k miles per year doesn't indicate fast charging, it's just pretty average use 80 miles per day five days a week.

And I'm also going to say that fast charging isn't the enemy of EVs that you might think if you believe everything you read on the Internet.

The enemy is high state of charge, and high temperature.

The specific usage pattern of this used car we'll never know. But if you give an EV to someone on lease, that they basically don't care about because they're only keeping it 2 years, what are they going to do? The answer is make sure its always fully charged. They'd charge it whilst driving it if they could. Because the only question anyone asks them is 'how far can it go on a charge' and they have range anxiety.

So, instead of charging to 80% and discharging on their daily 80 mile commute to 40% then taking it back to 80%. They go to 100% every night, just in case. Even on Friday night, so the car can sit at 100% all weekend.

This is all guessing and supposition, but that is how to degrade an EV. Multiple consecutive DC charging did some damage to early Leafs and similar because they have no battery cooling... and they got hot. Not a problem with the MGs which have lovely glycol coolant circulating.

The worst EVs to buy are those ex demonstration models that have been literally on charge in the forecourt 24/7/365 with just the odd test drive around the block... then back up to 100%!!

You can't reverse degradation, but you can take care of your car from now on so ensure future degradation is as low as possible.

Regards,
Tom.

 

[Gadget Geek]

any idea if it improves with slow charge from now on or that's that, no improvement possible ?

On the plus side, battery health deteriorates on a logarithmic curve, so the deteriation slows down after the first couple of years. So you shouldn't see much deteriation over the next few years.

Research by Guena and Leblanc shows a “four-fold improvement is expected between 100% DOD and 50% DOD" meaning that a battery that is only cycled between 80% and 30% will hold its capacity four times as long as the expected life of a battery cycled from 100% to 0% -- although, in the real world, lithium ion batteries in cars never reach 100% or 0%.

Depth of Discharge: Basics for Every EV Owner

Electric cars are young enough in 2023 that we are still learning about how their batteries age over the years. One thing that scientists understand well, after 20 years of studying lithium batteries, is that battery health is sensitive to something called depth of discharge.

www.recurrentauto.com

The specific usage pattern of this used car we'll never know. But if you give an EV to someone on lease, that they basically don't care about because they're only keeping it 2 years, what are they going to do? The answer is make sure its always fully charged. They'd charge it whilst driving it if they could. Because the only question anyone asks them is 'how far can it go on a charge' and they have range anxiety.

I agree with you and I think the key part is that it was leased. Therefore there was no incentive to take any extra precautions on looking after the battery as an owner would.

 

[tomhanman]

In fact isn't the standard range face-lift ZS supposed to be lfp? You should be able to see how many cells there are on the battery using car scanner, which would confirm that.

Our long range ZS is definitely 96S nmc chemistry and when I see it fully charged to 100% for a long journey the dash shows 406V... that is 4.23V per cell... and that is at least 100%!!!

I think MG are playing it fast and loose with their battery stats. 100% in a Leaf is 4.13V ish which is actually about 90% charge for the battery. So The safety is built in to prolong battery life (didn't work though!).

With the MG 100% really is 100% and so we get extra available (and advertiseable) range, but it should be used extremely sparingly.

 

[fred12345]

I agree with you and I think the key part is that it was leased. Therefore there was no incentive to take any extra precautions on looking after the battery as an owner would.

This is what I got from Car Scanner yesterday, means absolutely nothing to me so if you guys can figure out how the previous lease-guy cared about the car, thumbs up

I have no idea what I'm looking at

 

[tomhanman]

LFP... which is supposed to degrade less than nmc. Bad luck.

In car scanner, if you go to view all sensors and scrolling down through a lot of nonsense you should see the voltage of each and every cell reported... if that is of any interest to you!

You could try letting it get down to very low battery warning and then fully charging. And doing it a couple of times. It might help the bms re-learn the capacity remaining in case it has been confused by never getting near empty. Obviously you want to be doing it very near home!

 

[fred12345]

LFP... which is supposed to degrade less than nmc. Bad luck.

In car scanner, if you go to view all sensors and scrolling down through a lot of nonsense you should see the voltage of each and every cell reported... if that is of any interest to you!

You could try letting it get down to very low battery warning and then fully charging. And doing it a couple of times. It might help the bms re-learn the capacity remaining in case it has been confused by never getting near empty. Obviously you want to be doing it very near home!

scaring me with "LFP... which is supposed to degrade less than nmc. Bad luck"
I'll check all sensors screen to see if I can figure it out and I'll try that 10%-100% charge too.

EDIT: funny bit first - SoH dropped from yesterday's 93.32% to 93.31% today !!!!

All the cells report 2.37V min and max voltage apart from CMU01 that is 2.36V for min and max voltage and CMU02 with 2.36V min and 2.37V max voltage.

 

[Coulomb]

All the cells report 2.37V min and max voltage apart from CMU01 that is 2.36V for min and max voltage...

That can't be right. I see all the cells at 3.28V. Where is this coming from? 2.36V is disastrously low for an LFP cell.

 

[tomhanman]

Yeah, don't worry about that. Clearly the same problem as on the 70kWh the software is not correctly interpreting the data. Maybe we should tell Car Scanner about that. It would be interesting to know how many cells there ,are though... 120 I figure. Which gives you 430V fully charged and explains the higher power output of the lfp version, something for you to be happy about

 

[fred12345]

That can't be right. I see all the cells at 3.28V. Where is this coming from? 2.36V is disastrously low for an LFP cell.

I don't know anything about anything battery related, this is from Car Scanner yesterday, is that what I'm supposed to look at for individual cells? App dashboard shows 3.28v min

 

[tomhanman]

Yep, it doesn't work!

I just had a look using Car Scanner with both my cheapo 1.99€ AliExpress unit and my LELink 45€ unit. And I get exactly the same gobbledygook you do on both adaptors. The individual cells values are useless, as are a lot of the rest... and of course that makes you wonder abput the values that seem plausible, they may be correct, or it may just be coincidence.

I also tried a sideloaded version of eZS and that doesn't seem to work with the expensive BLE dongle at all. It sticks on 10-20% loading when using the cheapo one.

Guess we're just supposed to drive them, not fiddle with them