EP183 - How to fix the PHEV Battery Degradation Problem!

[Music] yes this is the video you were all waiting for I will explain what we think the problem is and talk about potential solutions okay let's get right into ah the intro of course and as requested by some of you guys here comes the music again [Music] okay I'm not just kidding I'm just kidding now guys seriously let me explain what actually happened okay yeah we're just kidding let's get started now we've got so many things to talk about we shall play some music in the background not not this one [Music] let me just call it after playing all these intros and music now it's 11:30 p.m. it's far too late so I will go to bed now and explain everything tomorrow to you okay you have good night's sleep Hey good morning guys without any further due to let me come to the point one of our team members of team Phe VM Gerard he was the first guy who got the battery replaced in his car and as I've told you before his state of health dropped dramatically afterwards he wasn't of course happy brought the car back and that it's a magic on the car since then the car is totally fine well it turned out Gerard is actually a programmer and coder he's also a pH EB owner of course and what I didn't know before he's also an actor playing in musicals so good on your Gerard and of course for the sake of the video we want to concentrate on his software and coding skills at the moment so to understand what was actually going on in his car he looked into different forums where bmu software and codes were discussed he also somehow I don't know exactly how he did it but he was able to lock on to his car and read out his own bmu parameters and he shared all these details in our forum with us it is quite mind-blowing and what I said in the other video before it all makes sense now when you when you have all this inside information and from looking at his own BM you in his car he could see that the software has several registers slices where it memorizes settings and data one of the registers contained the 38 m per hour value of the battery and as you all know the BM u assumes calculates guesses the state of health of the battery and shows us the calculated state of health through the dog thirty point two thirty point one thirty MPR's at some point he went to the dealership and said look I'm down to a 30 amp hours this is not good enough this is not what you promised after a long discussion with Mitsubishi you know the whole story we finally got the approval and commitment from its ability to replace the batteries so what they had what they did on his car is replacing the battery and resetting the BM you and the reset and the reset as we all know does the following it raises all the data of the bmu and resets it to 100% well this is what we thought until he looked into it apparently this is not the case what a reset does is the reset of the bmu does what a reset does it wipes all the information in the B mu the B mu is now wiped reset totally erased and has no information about the battery anymore and this is exactly where the whole problem starts the B mu has no reference point anymore about the battery it doesn't know anything about the battery the size the capacity the age nothing anymore it's all wiped out so all the dealerships have done it correctly they followed the procedure of Mitsubishi Motors worldwide this is the standard procedure with which is currently in place and is the valid process to replace a battery replace the battery reset the B mu and then of course you get your car back and the B mu does not know anything about the battery so what it does it starts guessing and at the beginning it says ok we are at 38th and powers so but there's no reference to compare it with there's no calibration point ever it starts with 38 empowers and after a while it says our 38 empowers maybe not so much better be conservative and protect the battery and go down I'm not sure how large the battery is I've got no reference point 37.9 next day I'm not sure about this either it looks like something is not working out and we all know how this ends after a short while we are down to a 35 M powers again so this is the common procedure at the moment what happens with all the cars then he got back to the dealership and said look this is not good enough and Mitsubishi Motors Australia took the car back into the workshop did some more testing what they finally did was another reset a self smoothing procedure and what they exactly did was another reset so wiping all the information as self smoothing to bring all the cells to the optimal same level and Eddie became and this stuff the following so firstly they did another reset wiped all the wrong information the wrong calculated and stored information the dealer then did a low level self smoothing procedure as I have explained in one of my previous videos and the most important part is so the most important part is that it a DB cam and the DB cam is the only procedure which can actually write information in this register up here so soul smoothing cell leveling DB cam writes the information back in the top register 40mp hours this is the nominal capacity of the battery so and from this day the BM you was actually able to confirm these 40 MP hours every single day because it had a reference point the register up here tells the BM you this is what you should have have a look at the battery how good it still is and yes the battery is still at 40 M powers it still shows 40mp hours in the dark and and we know this sounds weird because we always thought 100% is 38 empowers which it is but the BM you actually knows about the 40mp hours which we always thought is not the case we always assumed the battery knows the battery management unit knows only about the 38 empowers not the 40 I explained this in one of my recent videos the battery does not get overcharged in his car it still stops the charging at four point one volts and it also let the engine kick in at three point seven three point eight volts so the the bottom buffer and the top offer are still reserved for battery longevity and are not being used in this case but the software is now correctly calibrated and another assumption we made wrongly is that the BM you actually can learn the true state of health of the battery what Jared told us on the forum this is apparently not the case from what you can see in the code there's no way there's no way for the BM you to actually learn itself and put information into the drop register there's no learning process of the BM you in terms of the state of health at all so the the only way to tell the BM you what the real state of health is is through a DB chem DB cam is the only procedure which can do that and which can set this top register for the software and of course now you will ask Andy what is happening to all these cars they're running fine for the first one or two years and then they start dropping dramatically and here comes the bad software into the game the software has been calibrated maybe only once at the beginning of its life and from there on it was left on its own to learn the state of health of the battery and it does a pretty amazingly bad job in that actually it constantly compares what it should be to what it has calculated over time and it has so many calculations done which are all not correct and you go to your dealership again and the first thing they do is a DB cam so what did you became thus it writes another register up here with the true state of health of the battery but because they are not doing a reset the BM you still remembers all these learnt information down here and it compares them with the new state of health and it still says well but my experience is that the battery is down to 35 not to 37 after the became the level probably goes up just a little tiny bit and this is exactly what we have seen so many times on the forums that after adda became the state of health of the battery is shown in the dog went up just a little bit 35 to 35 point 2m per hours and this is because the BM you still remembers all the other wrong information in its registers down here just imagine the following the BM you has maybe a register of 500 learned state of Health entries in his memory and then the DB came comes and writes another reference point in the upper register which is far higher than the actual calculated ones from the BM you just imagine you do the average of all these 500 lower values and then there's one which is far up the average will not rise that much just because of this one last correctly calculated state of health so what it does that's just how you can imagine it it takes the average of all these values and this is exactly the reason while the DB cam alone does not make any progress in this whole process so the only correct way to do it so before you do a DB cam you have to do a reset you have to do a reset on the BM you to get rid of all these wrong learned information then you do the DB cam and from now you're fine once the car is turned on the BM you see is only this value here and says okay my battery is at 37 MP hours the next value I am calculating is 37 MP hours because it has no memory of the wrong calculated figures before and of course because the software is not optimal programmed it will lose track after a while again it constantly compares these 37 and powers of the DB cam with what it actually calculates and what the history is so it will build up a history of wrong calculated state of health again over time and again this shows only how not optimal the software is being programmed and of course of course now you will ask Andy what is happening with all these brand new cars the 2019 models which see plummeting down on the dog website and you said this is clearly not normal and you are totally right this is definitely not normal so we are not hundred percent sure what happens with the new cars but from what we can see it looks like the software of new cars is not being calibrated so what we think happens in new cars is you got a brand new battery with 40 MP hours of capacity there's nothing wrong with the battery and you got your brand new BM you this I'm I'm just using the I'm just using the P HEV box as a BM u so - so what they are doing in the factory brand new battery brand new BM you they put them together and sell the vehicle to the customer the brand new bmu has no calibration no information whatsoever about the battery it cannot refer back to any information how large the battery is how old it is what capacity it has and there could be two reasons for that either the BM u comes from the manufacturer in China or Japan or wherever as manufacturing these devices and it's not pre-programmed to the battery all registers are totally empty or may be what we think they are doing is once they pair the battery with a B mu they do a reset as per Mitsubishi instructions new battery new bmu new car do a reset and then give it out to the customer same result all registers are empty there's no reference point for the B mu at all where to start so it starts of course guessing it starts guessing and because the software is programmed conservatively it will go down fairly steep as we have all seen if the B mu is brand new and has no information whatsoever about about the battery how does it work then so they it can only estimate it can only estimate what is going on so it starts at 38 empowers but as we said before it's conservative it it's the battery down fairly quickly and we see this huge drop in health in the forums on the Phe V watch doctor net website and people are not happy about that because there is no reference point the software cannot reference back to any set parameters about the battery it does not know how much how big this battery is there's no label on it how do you tell how large this battery is if you don't have a label well as you can imagine this is only I guess the speculation and assumption from what we can see at the moment we are not sure if this is really the case but it damn looks like they are not programming the BM you correctly either when the car is new or whether when they do a DB came in existing cars so AD became an existing cars will only make sense if you do a reset before but this is not common knowledge in any dealership at all not even Mitsubishi Japan seems to know about this so whenever you go to your dealership and ask for a DB cam it will not make sense without a reset the figures coming back from the dog after P or D became after the became only reflects only an average of all the information the BM u has learned in his history plus the big spike at the end which is the true state of health of the battery but the yellow card in the battery condition tab of the P HEV watchdog is not what has been measured at the point of time of the DB cam this is only showing the average of learned information plus the real state of health of the battery at the end done by the DB cam and this is only what what we discover what Jared thinks the software works like the Sophia is not able to determine the state of Health and update the register itself at the moment we have got only two cars which had the reset the smoothing and the DB cam they are both fine we will have another car going back in next week and potentially my car will be week after going back in do another reset cell smoothing a cell leveling and finally that became to write the information of the battery back in the register well guys from what we can see right now it seems to be the only option at the moment to get this right reset the bmu and do a smoothing and addy became as it needs to be in this particular order to achieve the same result and we also think but don't quote me on that we don't know this is just speculation this reset this balancing and smoothing will also work for existing cars the recent gets rid of all the wrong information the DB cam sets the new correct value and from there on the software works fine for a while the Sophia still will be out of whack so after a while but this should be a at least one two or three years away we may we may have to bring the car back in and do the same procedure again reset the BM you of all history data and do a fresh DB cam to determine the true state of health of the battery okay guys so this is what we know at the moment that's what our experience is this is what we have found out in the last couple of weeks and I'm very happy to share this information with you now and and of course and this is all what I just made up this is not exactly how the bmu works but it breaks it down and hopefully it was not too hard to understand so don't quote me on things like it does an average of all the history and then the last DB cam with the true state of health this is not actually how it works in real life but to understand how it how it comes to this fault it's easier to have this picture in your mind how it roughly works so please don't quote me on any of these things this is just what I make up for the video now to keep it simple as possible I hope I did and again hopefully hopefully hopefully this is the easy fix we have all waited for it's not a software update well not yet it just reset a DB cam and self smoothing in between and you should be fine for the next two or three years until this whole situation happens again and on the negative side of things this is not officially confirmed by Mitsubishi yet they are happy to help they are happy to endorse these procedures now on the existing cars where the battery has been replaced so obviously there's more investigation necessary what is going on but basically this is what is happening right now and this is how you fix it so the pH TV cure might be as simple as reset smoothing DB cam and these are all tools which the dealership already has and there are no replacement parts necessary but quite obvious nobody has ever looked into the software or procedure side of things in terms of the battery calibration the software calibration with the Mitsubishi Outlander P HEV at this point of stage I would like to thank again everyone from the team pH TV for pushing this forward with Mitsubishi Motors Australia finding the fix the cure well we all hope it's the cure it's an easy cure it's like the vaccination for the P HEV and of course we will keep working with Mitsubishi here in Australia together to improve the procedures they have in place for battery replacements for managing existing cars for making the software better and for maintaining their existing fleet of pH IVs here in Australia and worldwide and I can I can only imagine that you have now tons of questions and comments about this whole process please leave them all down below in the comment field I'm sure the team P HEV will closely watch the comments here and will be to respond to your questions and messages especially Gerard who has discovered this software glitch this pmu clich thanks again for all your time Gerard to look into this problem all in your own time not being paid for Mitsubishi not being asked by Mitsubishi to do any of this research this is just purely what we are doing in our private time to push this one forward here we all want the Mitsubishi Outlander Phe B to succeed okay guys so far this little video well it's not as little it I actually never expected it to be a short video anyway there's so much to talk about it still so please leave your comments and questions down below we will hop on to them straight away and start a discussion here on YouTube and what we would like to see is if you have a brand new car if you have used one it doesn't matter go back to your dealership show them the video talk to them try to start an open dialogue with your dealership provide information assist them in helping get this fixed for your car and all the credit for me making this video goes to Gerard of course because he has discovered he he thinks he has discovered what is actually wrong with the bmu and the software and the state of health in the battery I would like to thank the team pH TV for their commitment in pushing this ahead here I would like to thank you guys for watching for your systems I am Andy from unlock TV Australia signing off you stay charged and for sure we will see us in the next video very soon ok guys see you then bye bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: unplugged EV

Views: 66,393

Keywords: Mitsubishi, Outlander, PHEV, EV, Electric Vehicle, charger, evse, battery, degradation, soh, state of health, soc, state fo charge, problems, electric, software, app, PHEV Watchdog, test, review, #PHEVcure, fail, fix, faulty battery, defect battery, old battery, service, repair battery, battery management system, battery management unit, BMU, BMS, software fix, firmeware, TeamPHEV, cure

Id: BH-Z1Fm9KZE

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 24 2019