Turtle light and stall

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Archsteve

Active member
Joined
May 12, 2013
Messages
25
So, I was driving my miev (2012 35k miles) down the road with 5 miles left, headed to a charging station. I go to this place often, sometimes with 2 or 3 miles left. Anyhow, it seemed I was hitting all the green lights, so was going at a nice steady 40 mph on flat ground. Suddenly the turtle came on, and I was crawling. I pulled over, turned it off, then back on. Turtle life went off, so I moved the car, but it came back on in about 5 seconds. This time it completely stalled out on me, and I had no power. I had it towed to the dealer. The 12v is about 2 years old. Could that be it? The dealer will get back to me on Monday. I am pretty interested to hear what the deal is.
 
With only 5 miles RR you were way down below the blinking fuel gauge bars, likely zero bars showing. So the pack was already very low and there could be one or more cells that are slightly degraded more than the rest such that their voltage dropped below the turtle limit, and so turtle was thrown. Not a problem if it charges back up to Full (16 bars). If it doesn't hit 16 bars when Full, then that is an indication of possible issues in the pack. It is probably better for the pack health to not discharge it that low unless necessary.
 
So the dealer still has my car, and is doing a multitude of tests for corporate engineers in Japan.
 
If it didn't charge back up to 16 bars when Full, then there is likely a weak or bad cell. But the first thing to check/charge is the 12V, then see if the car will charge to Full, then go to READY and operate without going into Turtle whenever you press WOT on the accelerator pedal.
 
Well, they are doing all kinds of tests for draining and filling the battery. Corporate wants them to reset some kind of smoothing function, which they think might fix it. The 12v was replaced 22 months back.
 
i just bought a brand new 51R 12V battery for a Laef yesterday from WalMar. It had a March 21 sticker on it, so it had sat on the shelf for 4 months. Got it home and it only measured 12.5V, and the fluid level was down below the slot in the fill tubes. i added some water and charged it for 12 hours at 1Amp, now it is reading 13.05. So my
"new" battery wasn't really up to what we would expect to see...

The Smoothing is Mitsu-speak for what we call balancing. They are trying to get the low cell to come up by repeatedly charging and discharging the pack while letting the balancer run or maybe they can command it to run. If the cell voltage is too far away from the rest of the pack, this will be a futile attempt.

Nissan owns Mits now so i would expect them to try to crawfish out of replacing your pack under warranty.
 
I am assuming the dealer checked the 12v? Right now they will also be driving the car 40 miles, to drain it down I guess. Are there any test results I should ask to see before they return the car to me? I assume they will find some reason not to replace.
 
i would want to know that the car will charge to Full (16 bars Full), and that it will go to READY and operate without going into Turtle whenever you press WOT on the accelerator pedal. e.g. drive it for 30 miles to drain the pack down to about 8 bars, then do the WOT test to see if Turtle occurs (it should not appear).
 
Archsteve said:
I am assuming the dealer checked the 12v? Right now they will also be driving the car 40 miles, to drain it down I guess. Are there any test results I should ask to see before they return the car to me?

It charges to full bars, and seems to be working great now.
 
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