How long are the Gen 3 traction batteries expected to last?

"The life of the car."

 

We have 130,000 miles and it is fine. The service manager told me between 200,000 and 300,000 miles.

 

agreed. 10 years is probably average, although, the gen 3 may turn out to be more robust, who knows?

some of it has to do with climate as well.

 

Yes, and temperature, too. Most of the original batteries we hear about lasting to very high mileages live in the North.

 

We have had very few Gen3 batts dead to date, and in general we lack good data. It will be interesting to see if Gen3 is less prone to batt failure due to more powerful engine and better software control.

Right now we are hearing a lot of 2007's going next year it'll be 2008's then 2009's. My theory is we have a batch, maybe up to 10%, go bad by the 8-10 years mark and some keep going.

 

my 2006 had more than 200,000 when I traded it, the 2014 has 88,000 on it right now.

 

Please!!!! The battery doesn't care about time passing or even miles driven !!! Batteries mostly care (NOT ONLY) of charging cycles .... so miles is in the equation but not solely, another strong enemy is overheating, and cell inbalance

Also important factor is proper maintenance of SOC.

 

forgive my ignorance...how do you maintain proper SOC?

 

You have to look at this way, people are more likely to complain if something is wrong. The majority of 2005 Prius have no issues and thus, no threads about their car working perfectly fine.

Consumer Reports had the traction battery defect rate at no more than 4% and that goes back to Gen 1 Prius more than 10 years old. Of course, there are always outliers where newer vehicles suffer battery issues. You might find it surprising that their are fewer Gen I Prius with battery issues. You shouldn't because there were fewer Gen I Prius sold than Gen 2. You have to look at numbers and statistics carefully.

My expectation is something else major on the car will fail before the battery does, like the ICE. My 2005 is at 131k and my 2012 is at 98k. I don't fiddle with SoC or battery conditioning. I just drive the car.

 

This is true. We are already starting to see a ramp up in Gen3 inquiries for our products. If Gen3 owners are not proactive in maintaining their batteries, they will see the same issues as Gen2 owners. It just has not manifested itself yet, as our customers are primarily in the 2004-2009 model years still. But this is changing as the Gen3's age . . .

With a Prolong™ Battery reconditioning system. You can read more at the below link.

Prolong Grid Charger FAQ - Hybrid Automotive

 

at the minimum do not let the HV battery discharge lower than recommended (like very long storage ... the battery has self discharge) also even dealerships offer some service ... also some specialized shops

most extreme is to rebalance the cells DIY but that is not an option (I guess) for average users ....

my point was/is that "battery life" is NOT measured by years or miles

 

DIY battery reconditioning and cell rebalancing is easily done at home, as often as desired, using our products. Our products do not require the battery to be removed from the vehicle or even accessed (after the one time car harness installation). It takes about 5 seconds to start a cell rebalancing treatment, and five seconds to terminate it when done. We have hundreds of customers who have used our products to recover batteries that have self-discharged from sitting unused for long periods of time.

 

I did check out the product ... I am intrigued (especially with the discharge part) and if that works as advertised might worth the money. But I am not an expert enough to judge.

Is this the same product sold via priuschat shop? The image is different. seem like the one on the website is a new/prettier design. (checked out the manual it seems to show the same as in priuschat image)

I probably could install the harness but again an average user will not do this.

Another question, if someone with a CARB warranty (10 year on the hybrid components) makes this modification and reconditioning on their own let say at year 6, and then battery dies 2 years later. Will Toyota honour that warranty ?? Or in case your product is defective and fries the battery (DIY done right) ... what's then ? seems you only warranty your own gadget which is 1/10 of the cost of a new battery pack.

 

Here are some before and after tests that might help:
Prolong Grid Charger FAQ - Hybrid Automotive

We do sell them here via the PriusChat shop. We released the next generation system in early March and the PriusChat shop has not yet had the photos updated. Only the new version is available now. The old 'box' units are no longer offered for sale.

Most end users do self-install but we have a rapidly growing re-seller network on three continents that can install the harness for someone who does not want to do it themselves:
Prolong Grid Charger Dealer Installer Map - Hybrid Automotive

The warranty impact is a great question. Toyota's policy is that aftermarket items will not void the warranty unless it is determined to be the root cause of the failure. Toyota did this in response to all of the PHEV conversion that were happening to the Gen2 Prius several years back. We have sold thousands of these to Honda and Toyota owners around the world and never had someone damage a battery using our products. Our products intentionally charge and discharge the battery at very low rates that make it near impossible to damage the battery. We even had a customer who left the charger connected and running for several weeks and his battery was OK.

If someone was very concerned about a potential warranty claim from a failed battery, it would only take an hour to remove the entire car harness such that the car was 100% stock for a dealer visit.

 

I also read your product. Do we need to get both the charger and discharger or can we just go by with 1. If so which one?

If both, is there a single unit that can do both? I'd rather plug only 1 unit and have the recharge done right after the discharge so I don't leave my battery at zero for a long time. Not sure even if that matters for nimh's. But bad experiences leaving 12v auto batteries discharged for prolonged periods is hard to overcome.

 

If your battery is still healthy, and you want to perform preventative maintenance only (i.e. not recondition the pack), the charge system is all that is needed. This info describes the different variants of our products and which application each should be used for:
Prolong Grid Charger FAQ - Hybrid Automotive

For Battery reconditioning, the Prolong Reconditioning Package is a single SKU that has everything needed to recondition the battery. Having said that, the charger and discharger are two separate physical units. This keeps costs as low as possible. To integrate them and have an automated transition would significantly increase the product complexity and cost. We are working on a unit that does exactly this for our professional customers (shops, resellers, etc). It will have several additional features, charging and balancing a pack in four hours, then automatically discharge while tapering the current load to maintain safe load levels on the battery, then charge again when done. It will also be somewhere between $1,500 AND $2,000. For our consumer focused units, we tried to keep the design as simple as possible to stay below the $400 retail price point. The trade off is a little manual monitoring is required.

NiMh cells are very durable. As long as they are deep discharged and charged at very low current levels, there is very little to no risk of damage from short term (several hours to couple days) polarity reversals. Even when the current load is a little higher than desired, they recover very well. This is different than lead acid battery behavior. If a user of our products waited a half day or day to transition from the discharge to charge sub-cycles (which happens all the time, even with us when we do it), the battery will not be adversely affected.

 

really? have you ever opened unused (zero cycles) milk week after the expiration date? how about old unused (zero cycles) alkaline batteries? seriously?