Yellow battery gauge

[Rolfe]

Small update. I drove until my battery was pretty low the other day, and I saw the indicator bar change to amber for real, or it certainly appeared to be for real. It wasn't at 50% though, it was 5%. (Not sure if it came on earlier, might have been there at 10%.) It was part and parcel of the "what the hell, I hope you know where my next charge is coming from!" performance the car was putting on at the time, which involved warning triangles and drop-down warnings on the dashboard screen and the battery symbol on the dashboard screen also going amber.

It wasn't that noticeable simply because there wasn't much left of the indicator bar by then. If it's ever meant to go red it didn't do it when I was looking, and I went down to 4% (when it was still amber). If it goes red below that, it's going to be a very small red stripe!

So I think that's it. The amber colour is there, coded into the software for the indicator bar, and intended to appear only when low SoC is looking problematic. But sometimes it does it at higher SoC just for the hell of it.

 

[BigRobbie]

I charge my LR to 100% a few days ago for an airport run to Lisbon. The bar was orange with a very thin line of darker orange along the bottom edge. I took this to mean that the HV battery pack had been cell balanced. Normally I charge between 40% and 80% until full range is needed. This was on a slow charge at home overnight. Once on the trip, the bar turned green again.

 

[Rolfe]

I don't think it means that. I charge my SR to 100% and let the cells balance every time I charge, and I've seen this exactly once. If you look back in the thread you'll see others reporting it happening pretty much at random, although infrequently, at various stages of charge.

I think it's a bug. As I said above, the bar (such as it is by then) seems to turn amber when you're getting to a very low state of charge. I think sometimes the amber colour just comes on by mistake. At least it's not indicating a fault, which was my concern when I saw it on my car.

 

[Richmorr]

I don't think it means that. I charge my SR to 100% and let the cells balance every time I charge, and I've seen this exactly once. If you look back in the thread you'll see others reporting it happening pretty much at random, although infrequently, at various stages of charge.

I think it's a bug. As I said above, the bar (such as it is by then) seems to turn amber when you're getting to a very low state of charge. I think sometimes the amber colour just comes on by mistake. At least it's not indicating a fault, which was my concern when I saw it on my car.

It’s is safe to charge it the SR to 100%. I couldn’t see anything in the manual, which said you should, only app which doesn’t allow you to set it to 80% and is locked out 100%

 

[Rolfe]

Yes, I know. I don't think the amber battery gauge has anything to do with that. I think the potential for the gauge to become amber is coded in to be activated at very low SoC, but sometimes it gets enthusiastic and comes on at other times when it shouldn't.

 

[Ian Key]

It’s is safe to charge it the SR to 100%. I couldn’t see anything in the manual, which said you should, only app which doesn’t allow you to set it to 80% and is locked out 100%

Yes it is and the ability to limit the charge percentage was removed from the SR in a recent update.

 

[Richmorr]

Yes it is and the ability to limit the charge percentage was removed from the SR in a recent update.

Thanks pal

 

[siteguru]

Not so recent ... I had the slider for 2 weeks (ish) after getting my car (over 6 months ago), then it disappeared from the app - and the app hadn't had an update. (I think it's an MG server-side thing, and they set all cars to default as LR until they realise that some specific cars are SR, whereupon a server-side config change is made which results in the slider going away).

 

[Rusty]

HI, I have a SE LR for over 4 months at 3900 miles and never had the amber on the charge % main screen. The other day I was looking at the discharge info page and it was set at 20%, so I thought I would put it up to 40% . Yesterday when turning on the car going to work the amber colour was on the charge % . Is this a coincidence? The car was at 42% . So got to work and thought about it and changed the discharge back to 20% . After work started up and car showed 38% in green. So I will see if this is connected to amber warning. By the way am very pleased with the car.

 

[Rolfe]

I was watching these two videos where the driver ran both an SE SR and a Trophy down to very low charge, and in both of these the central screen charge % had gone amber by the time it was below 5%. (He got the SR down to 2%.) Same in my car the day I ran it down to 4%. (You don't notice it much, because there's so little of the bar coloured by that time.)

I think it's just that occasionally the amber colour that's coded in to show below 5% charge decides to show up at a higher SoC, just for the hell of it.

I did get it again the other day when I woke the car up at 100% charge, but it was momentary. I only had time to register that it was showing amber before it changed back to green.

If I was designing this thing I think I would make it go amber below about 20% and red below 7% (the point where you get the "low battery" warning), but it seems to be set to stay green till 5% then turn amber. Maybe the amber colour is lonely and just wants to get out more.

 

[KenD]

It is second times happened that the battery bar turned orange/yellow.

Any one had it before?

 

[siteguru]

Just search this board for Orange ... there are a few threads about this happening.

Received wisdom is that the bar turns orange (intentionally) when the SoC is very low ... but sometimes the software glitches and shows the orange bar when SoC is perfectly OK.

It'll go away and back to green in its own time - nothing really to worry about.

 

[KenD]

It is back to green when starting the car again.

 

[Rolfe]

This is an interesting one. My car did it when it was at 100% charge, once, and I saw it once more when I started the car but on that occasion it changed to green almost immediately.

I have realised when watching videos of range tests on the MG4 that the battery indicator on the central screen is supposed to change to amber once the SoC gets below a certain %, then to red when it gets pretty low. But this is not happening on most cars. Apart from the couple of times I got the random amber colour at high SoC, I only saw amber when the car went down as low as 4% once. The videos of the cars where this is working show it at red when it's as low as that.

It's another bug, folks. The programme to get the % charge bar to change colour isn't working, and every so often the amber colour gets lonely and comes out to say hello.

 

[dsimpkins]

It's not a bug, it's a "feature"

 

[Rolfe]

 

[Ian Key]

It's not a bug, it's a "feature"

Are you after a job with MG?

 

[tsedge]

It's Gary's secret account

 

[dsimpkins]

No, I'm not Gary, just spent 30+ years in IT, and you have to develop a sense of humour or go mad

 

[Rolfe]

Having looked back at the Bjorn Nyland videos, I only see the other battery indicator, the one you see under charging management, changing colour with SoC. So I can't say for sure that the main central one was doing that.

In my own car I saw it (the main central screen display) at amber when I got down to 4%. By that time, of course, there was so little of the bar left that it was hard to notice, and seemed a bit pointless. It was still green at the point where the car offered me the chance to put it into power-saving mode, which I think was around 10%.

I still think this is the explanation for the rogue amber colour though.