Prius plug in battery only getting 8 miles per charge. Help!

if it is possible to rejuvinate these cells, it is unfortunate that toyota doesn't have a method. it would be so much better for the environment to extend the life of batteries.

 

Plus, we have to know if the cell terminals are accessible ? While watching the Webber Univ. Prime pack video Prof John Kelly shows the 5 sets / banks of cells separately, but I don't recall noticing how easy or hard it would be to get at each cells terminals.
youtu.be/yGMcQ6JWlBs

 

As soon as one manufacture does that @bisco they will all have their hands held to the fire too.
The guy (now retired) at 99mpg.com has saved a lot of hybrid batteries with his open sourced grid charger design and the diagrams describing the build process so others could build their own versions. The diagrams also spawned a lot of other companies both offering grid discharger / charger equipment and re-manufactured packs..

 

Like all manufacturers, they use minimal cell monitoring so they stay well away from the upper and lower cell voltages, so getting the cells back to 100% capacity isn't going to happen while in service. The next thing is these cells don't actually reach 100% just because the upper cell voltage is reached, just like lead acid batteries, they need to be held at the upper voltage for some time until they stop accepting current because they are fully charged.
This means if the upper cell voltage was never reached, there certainly wasn't any absorption time included. This means the actual capacity held in each cell will slowly reduce with each cycle

T1 Terry

 

i'm sorry to hear that. isn't there a better way to do it?

 

It sure would be nice if there was / is a better way. Or even better yet, a million mile or 12 million mile battery like's being advertised by brokerage firms. Getting another 100 or 200K miles from a pack that a car flags as needing replacement is the best we've got, so far to the best of my understanding.

 

hoping for a 60k market surge so a tesla using this new battery can cross country 6 times on a single charger.

get in while it's hot

 

Not safely because you wouldn't know which cell group had stopped absorbing charge, unless you could get a cell monitor to cover the whole lot of the cell groups with an alarm port to signal the charger to stop for an adjustable length of time if a cell group reached 4.05v. Ideally there would be a cell balancer as well to move the over capacity to the under capacity cells, but it would need to be rather flash to actually draw power from the high cells, increase the voltage slightly and send that to the low cells.

There would need to be testing to determine the charge rate to avoid over powering the absorption capability of the cells when the absorption stage was reached, otherwise a false full capacity signal would be seen

Might be better to build an LTO battery to replace the existing battery.

https://nickelinstitute.org/blog/2020/february/competitive-technologies-to-high-nickel-lithium-ion-batteries-the-pros-and-cons/

T1 Terry

 

Yes in Finland a lot of salt is applied to our roads. The mechanic had to heat one of the "caliper slide pins" (thanks for the terminology! )with a blowtorch just to get it away. The previous owner had changed the rear brake discs only 40 000km/25 000 miles before. I now had to change them already. I definitely will be checking those pins now!

The range has improved a bit (i did not disconnect the battery). The range is now 15km / 9,4 miles. This actually is getting closer to the Dr Prius test result (77%) which I got last year.