Premature Battery Failure? - 450h

[Eatdirt13]

I'm a bit worried that when I get in my car after I finish work, I usually have about half Battery, but then literally a few minutes of town driving, I'm down to 2 bars! Surely it should be lasting longer than this, even if I was purely on Battery?

When I'm up to speed it does also charge quick, and I do get a full green Battery now and then. I'm just concerned about rate of discharge in town.

Can someone advise?

Thanks

[mkbean]

If its warm in the cabin, the AC will be taking a lot of power, probably enough to drain a full Battery by itself within half an hour or so. (3-6 kW?)

I'm pretty sure this is why when i stop at the car wash the Battery is depleted by the end if the queue is more than 15 mins or so.

I had a Prius before which seemed a little cleverer in stop-start traffic. Once the Battery got to a couple of bars it would just run the engine whenever the car was moving but not when stationary. The GS just seems to let the Battery get to 1 bar, run the engine continually until it charges and repeat.

[AmbroseJohn]

Mine does that too but it passed its health check with no problems. When the gauge shows dead flat, you still have 65% charge.

Don't panic, it's normal. :)

[Hangie]

You need to remember that we got rather small Battery - 1.9KWh while usable is not even that to keep it healthy for long time. I believe we can assume that maybe 1KWh is available for us. If AC will take 6KW fully loaded Battery will last 10 mins.

You can do similar calculation for driving. Lets say you are driving very gently and use 10KW (13hp) it will last for 5 minutes of driving - without any power loss which are there for sure.

 

In case of GS450h you need to think about hybrid system as something like KERS in F1 or fancy system of converting power into torque and not like something you can use to cruise around.

[Eatdirt13]

Thanks, I shall not panic for now then!