Great deal on Roadster with "weird issue".

[ravng]

Hi Guys.
A friend of mine just struck a great deal on a 2010 2.0 Roadster.
The seller priced it with a "defective battery", however the battery is working just fine, but has had a weird issue the last two years.

I have not seen the car myself yet so I have not been able to read out any logs or similar, but the explination I got is as follows:

- The car performes great and has been used for commuting every day.
- But if left on charge for ~a week the car apears to be dead (I don't know what they mean by "dead").
- To get the car back to life it needs to sit unconnected over night, then it appears normal again.
- However, if the car is parked for over a week without beeing on charge it works just fine.

Again, I don't have any details yet (but will update you guys when I have seen the car myself), but Tesla has changed the "brain" (I guess this means the PEM). They recommended pack swap.
But I guess this is partly because the alternative is sending the pack back and forth to California?

Can it be some kind of situation where a maintainance charge puts the pack over a safe limit (or a false positive of this), and when the pack rests it gets down below this limit?

Anyone with suggestions on what this can be?

I guess the solution for my friend is to have the charge on timer or something.

 

[augkuo]

The battery is probably fine but sounds like if it's charged beyond a certain threshold (near full or full) then somehow the car thinks that the battery is dead. Once you let the battery trickle down then it realizes that is charged so it'll work again. You could ask your friend to switch from standard mode to range mode and see if that makes any difference.

 

[wiztecy]

Sounds like a BMS issue to me. But I would have thought Tesla could have diagnosed that rather easily if they had it.

 

[supersnoop]

That kind of sounds like a security system issue that someone else had a couple months back. The security system seemed to shut the entire car down. But I thought that was related to the 12v battery. Anyone else remember that issue?

 

[ravng]

Due to the holidays and everything I looked at the car for the first time yesterday.
The car was not fully charged and therefor worked normally.

The Fault light is always on, and it said battery maintenance required.
Putting the vds in debug mode revealed a "Battery Bleed Scan Failure" (ID:7 0x812BB8B4)
Anyone have an idea what this means?

 

[ecarfan]

I do not know anything about that error message, but am wondering why your friend has not taken the car to a Tesla Service Center where a proper diagnosis could be made. Is he too far away from one of the 10 Service Centers in Norway? Or he could pull the logs and upload them to Tesla so they could analyze them.

If it was my Roadster I would do everything I could to get the car to Tesla, as it seems unlikely that he will be able to fix the problem himself.

I can certainly appreciate the desire to try to understand the problem better, I've been in the same situation myself with my Roadster. But I know that I won't be able to fix a Roadster problem on my own.

 

[ravng]

He just received the car.
Tesla has previously tried to swap the pem, but that did not help. So the problem is in the battery pack, and they do not fix those (need to buy a new pack, and the car was priced with that in mind.).

The question is if it's worth fixing, since the car drives just fine (for now). I am sure some people on this forum knows more about this than Tesla service centers in norway since they rarely see roadsters. First time I came to my local service center they all came out to see the car, they had never seen a roadster before, and they used 2 months to program new keys for my car.

 

[wiztecy]

Due to the holidays and everything I looked at the car for the first time yesterday.
The car was not fully charged and therefor worked normally.

The Fault light is always on, and it said battery maintenance required.
Putting the vds in debug mode revealed a "Battery Bleed Scan Failure" (ID:7 0x812BB8B4)
Anyone have an idea what this means?

Battery bleed scan determines if a cell or more than one cell in a battery is bad via a controlled discharge of the pack. Most likely Tesla does a bleed on each brick in the sheet or even just the sheet itself. If the sheet / component drops faster than a specific threshold, its deemed to be damaged.

Did you examine the battery logs to see how all the individual brick voltages and Ah are?

 

[ravng]

Have not examined the logs yet. The USB stick I had would not work.

So during the weekend the OVMS I installed stoped responding. He woke up the car by unlocking it and then a new error was reported:
"ID1522 Backup power active", car operates as normal.

 

[ecarfan]

Tesla service centers in norway since they rarely see roadsters

Jens Kratholm in Narvik owns 7 Roadsters, you might try contacting him and see if he can advise you. See Envy The Man Who Owns Seven Tesla Electric Cars (In Norway) . Sorry I do not have his contact information but Narvik is a pretty small place, I bet you could track him down.

However, I assume you are in Oslo so he may not be able to help.

 

[ravng]

Just an update.

Tesla had a look at the car. There was a leak in the batterypack:

They patched it together, however my friend ended up ordering a new 3.0 battery.

 

[spaceballs]

Just an update.

Tesla had a look at the car. There was a leak in the batterypack:

View attachment 222370

They patched it together, however my friend ended up ordering a new 3.0 battery.

That's not a photo of inside the battery pack. that the outside of the ESS.
Also if you see it dripping there, it's just either the hose, hose clamps, or metal that is cracked on the outside of the cooling tube.
My guess from that photos is it leaking outside of the ESS pack.