Buying a 2011 iMiev in 2020 - battery check

Hello world

I'm proudly going to buy an awesome shiny 9 years old EV and I wonder if this old low priced vehicle would be a good one so need gurus assistance on that.

I've checked the battery with whatever I had by hand (delphi 150) and it showed 0.01-0.025 voltage diffs in all the MCUs which I think is not bad and then there's something scarry - MCU #12, #3, #4 showed ~16 Volts while the rest were ~32+/-0,2 and that's looks like dead or semidead?
The questions are...
- should I buy it (all the rest looks good. mileage is 110kkm)?
- Is BCU capable of handling dead modules and keep vehicle working so it could run like 100km / charge?
- If it means a repair is needed - what's the cost of a used module? Are there any difficulties when replacing a module related to a specific soft / tools needed to link replacement modules to BSU? Or its a plug-and-have-fun?

Thanks for your attention

Have to answer myself
2 modules of 12 are 4 cells: 4x4V=16V
other 10 are 8 cells: 8x4V=32V
the third one is a measurement problem (clicked the same MCU twice but considered its another one)
verdict: will live. for a while.

drcat, welcome to the forum.

Glad you answered your own questions, as I think some of us were confused by your readings. Normally, we rely on an OBDII app to give us the readout of each cell. Were you checking the battery pack with the lid off?

Normally we check for the battery's overall state of health by looking at its capacity in ampere-hours (Ah), once again through an app reading off the OBDII port. Recognize that a brand-new battery pack will show a reading around 45Ah even though our cells are nominally 50Ah. For a nine-year-old i-MiEV I would expect the pack reading to be in the 32Ah-37Ah range.

In any case, to answer your original question, there are a number of threads on this forum which talk about battery and cell replacement under the Batteries and Battery Management subforum

This area is also discussed on both the Australian and UK/European EV forums (sorry, don't have the links with me on this computer).

Good luck, and let us know of your progress.

Which ODB tool are you using?
Delphi DS150 is pretty advanced scan tool which sees everything in the imiev including airbags, abs etc

https://aliexpress.ru/item/4000246011724.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.3b9923f1IBpukm&algo_pvid=d585cb76-7842-4738-a0ab-8229d15055b5&algo_expid=d585cb76-7842-4738-a0ab-8229d15055b5-7&btsid=0b8b037016075864336195138e9d6b&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_

clones are very affordable
It tracks every cell voltage but the software UI is awful for that purpose. Need to access each MCU individually and list params one by one.

is there anything decent for generic ELM327? I see people using hobdrive which is not free but very glitchy

drcat said:

Which ODB tool are you using?

Click to expand...

I'm primarily familiar with the Android app CaniOn, which requires OBDLink adapters (I can't keep up with which ones nowadays) but doesn't show Ah for 2016 (2014?) i-MiEVs. It has lots of great features but does not display error codes nor any way of resetting them.

drcat said:

Delphi DS150 is pretty advanced scan tool which sees everything in the imiev including airbags, abs etc... It tracks every cell voltage but the software UI is awful for that purpose. Need to access each MCU individually and list params one by one.

Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing us to this one and the brief summary of its attributes.

drcat said:

is there anything decent for generic ELM327? I see people using hobdrive which is not free but very glitchy

Click to expand...

Anyone care to start a thread which identifies every single OBDII tool out there that works with the i-MiEV triplets, its OBDII interface requirements, its hardware and software and platforms, and an assessment of its performance?