Charging cable life span

Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: If you charge to get to work, charge to get home, and every other day, do a top-off charge for some evening errands, doing that 365 days per year, 10K matings will get you through about 11 years.

 

This is true unless your car is outside in freezing sleeting conditions, winter wreaks years of life off stuff

 

it's been 5 years, and i haven't heard of any pip cables failing yet. we had this discussion back then too. and new cables were $5 or 600. now $300.? and if you ever do need one, they'll probably be a hundred bucks. i wonder what happens to the salvage cables?

 

On my old PIP, the only problem I had was the orange O-Ring slipped and restricted plugging into the car. I removed the O-Ring and it worked ok. Had my old PIP for 5 years and the charging cable was fine.

 

Probably about the same lifespan as the socket on the car.

 

The SAE J1772 plug would be easy to replace. Finding one might be the hardest part. It's only four conductors. Easy. (The fifth pin is just a proximity pin that tells the car's charger that the cord is plugged in and ready to charge.)

"Local Toyota rep claims the cable is targeted for a 15 year lifespan"
Know when car salesmen tell the truth? When they're in the little booth and say, "Father forgive me...."

 

can you clarify your first sentence? are you saying you might cancel your order and buy a non plug in if you have to replace the cable very 10 years?

 

I suspect one of two possible scenarios.
1) The cable has some circuitry to test the conductance of the wires and integrity of the insulation. If it fails the test, the system refuses to charge and gives a message saying the cable has failed. this could at least partly explain the delay after you plug it in before it starts charging.
2) One of the conductors develops an open and it simply won't charge, or two conductors short and they trip either the gfci or the circuit breaker.
That's just guessing, but I don't know why they would build in extra complexity.

 

how do you sleep at night.

 

funny thing is, we had this same thread with the pip. one guy found the info in the o/m, and a thousand posts later, we hadn't settled anything.

 

I did learn a little on this page. No answers for the OP, but I'm not as ignorant as I used to be. And praise the Lord for that!!
How the J1772 charging standard for plug-in vehicles works | EDN

 

Since that would require two separate technologies (surge tester and TDR) typically costing thousands of dollars each, I think we can rule that one out.

 

I tend to doubt that Wikipedia's unreferenced statement about 10,000 matings is all that relevant. Since they don't give a source it's hard to determine what exactly is meant by that, my guess is that this is a minimum that a manufacturer has to meet in order to claim they meet the standard, not a "do not exceed". Otherwise after 10,000 matings not only would a light illuminate on the cable, but a light would also come on the dash informing you that you have to bring the vehicle in for service to get the connector on the car replaced. The car would need to keep it's own separate matings count since different cables might be plugged into the car, for example if the original cable was lost or damaged and had to be replaced, or if you bought an L2 cable for home and used the L1 cable at work.

And anyway the manual refers to number of charges, not number of matings. Isn't that the same you may ask? Not necessarily, since you might plug it in when you get home expecting to charge later, but then later decide not to (or forget). Also to initiate Charge Now without having to select this mode in the MFD the manual mentions that you can connect the cable, disconnect, and connect again within five seconds and it will immediately start charging. Even though that's two matings, it's only one charge cycle.

My guess is the concern is more about the circuitry that is built into the cable, especially since that circuitry is part of what allows or disallows power to flow. And since the cable will quite possibly be plugged into uncontrolled power sources I would guess that they built voltage regulation and surge suppression into the cable. All of which has a limited lifetime and I would think this is why they put a limit on the number of charges. The only mystery is why Toyota for some reason chooses not to state what that number is.

 

Correct.

 

I believe I read that there's a counter inside the cable electronics which disables it after 10,000 pairings, which is over 13 years of twice a day pairings.