Car Battery Failure

[polygonum]

About two weeks ago car was in a paintshop for a week due to very minor accident damage. Last Tuesday it was in for MoT. Last Thursday the car would not start ? had been perfectly fine at last use on Wednesday. Battery appeared to have failed ? I got a moment or two of ignition light, then that would not light up and door locks would not work. Lidl charger wouldn?t even look at it. Not then, nor several hours later.

Called RAC, man came, jump start, seems OK (i.e. nothing whatsoever wrong with the car itself). Made some measurements on the battery and his special meter displayed ?REPLACE BATTERY?. But, rather surprisingly, it was charging and would restart the engine. RAC man made various notes on his callout form ? e.g. meter suggested capacity was down from 510 to

198 cold cranking current, charging was down less than 10 A after ten minutes, etc.

Called battery supplier (where I bought the current battery) as it has a lifetime warranty. OK- bring it in they said. So I did. When I got there they explained that the battery had to be cold. For now, I thought, OK ? I will pay for replacement, go home, swap them over and take old battery back for refund. Paid, took battery home, bought 3/8? extension bar for the socket set from Axminster (yes ? nothing I had would handle the precise position of the battery retainer), and swapped over.

Today I take the old battery, nice and cold, to supplier who tests it with his special meter thingy. ?Sorry, it?s fine. Perfectly OK.? Me, by then wondering what would happen, pointed at RAC man?s details. Man behind counter read then retried his meter ? this time it failed immediately. ?Won?t even load? or something like that. I got full refund

- so am happy. (Old battery was about 3 years, 9 months old. So fairly pleased at that.)

The battery appears to me to be a perfectly ordinary Yuasa 065.

Any suggestions for what the hell the battery was doing? If it had been pancaked and then refused to work at all, I would have understood. But it seemed mostly OK for a few days.

[newshound]

Never heard of a lifetime warrenty on a battery before. Just put a replacement Yuasa (expensive for the size, but no choice) on an 04 plate Carry, not sure if it was original.

[polygonum]

Sheet of paper had "one year/two year/lifetime" strike-through options - so not that unusual through this supplier. :-)

He did look very surprised to be handling a claim on a Yuasa - and was suggesting they do usually last forever (or at least until people have forgotten about the warranty!)

[Vir Campestris]

Feeling I've seen it before. It's replaced free while you own the car.

Now how often have you owned a car, and replaced the battery twice?

Andy

[The Other Mike]

I can't recall if it was Unipart or Halfords or even both that used to do lifetime warranties on batteries a couple of decades ago.

Most I've seen at a motor factors is about three years.

[Bob Eager]

Pretty sure Esso did.

[Davey]

snip

My thinking is that a car door was left ajar while it was in the paintshop, which drained the battery down to a very low level; or maybe the internal light was left on. Once it's been there, it's hard to predict what the battery is capable of doing.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I got 11 years out of the replacement Bosch battery in my BMW. Not many people keep a car that long. IMHO, no lead acid battery lasts forever.

[Davey]

Nor the battery of a laptop computer.

[Michael Chare]

My experience of modern cars/batteries is that the batteries tend to die completely suddenly. - perhaps because (IME) modern cars tend to be very good at starting, and so will work with batteries that only store a small charge.

[Frank Erskine]

Many many years ago I had a Morris Marina (1.8TC Coupe). One one occasion the battery would flatten after a couple of days (I only used it occasionally). I measured the quiescent discharge of the battery at almost exactly half an amp, which I thought was a bit too much like some real figure. It turned out to be the 6W hatch-back light. The clip-in Pin switch had dislocated itself, leaving the lamp glowimg permanently whilst the hatch was closed.

[Brian Gaff]

Dodgy internal connection, probably starting to corrode on intercell connections. Brian

[Gary]

I had a life time guarantee battery for a Nissan, which I got from Leyland spares and my experiance was simular to yours. It started the car on a cold spring morning. No problem, so off we went to the local petrol station 2 mins down road. Filled up for the jurney and went to start the car and nothing. the radio went off and nothing. Luckily the standing voltage was enough to run the ignition system so it bumped. We did a 150 miles and when we got to where we were going, switched off and on again and nothing at all. We had to get a battery from the local Leyland parts garage. ( lucky it was open as it was a Easter weekend).

Gary

[Jules Richardson]

Our ol' Toyota's battery made it to 15 before it finally gave up. Summers up around 80F here, and winters as cold as -40F, so it's not like it was a "hot climate" or "cold climate" thing that made it do so well. It was used just about every day, so never had to sit unused for long periods, and perhaps that helped - but plenty of other vehicles are used like that, and their batteries don't last nearly as long.

Battery was an Interstate, rated somewhere around 650 CCA IIRC. Mileage is up around the 250k mark.

Oh, and now at 16 years, the original exhaust system has just started blowing - somehow I doubt a replacement will do as well :-(

cheers

Jules

[Adrian]

The (Citroen branded) battery on 'erselfs 2cv has a sticker on it saying "IMPORTANT - USE BEFORE MARCH 2002". I know we didn't buy it new, so it probably got swapped around off another car at some stage. It's sat on the car, disconnected, but totally unused every winter, and up to 2yrs on a couple of occasions. A few times, it's been left connected for extended periods and the radio memory's drained it so flat that the oil pressure light won't even come on when you turn the key.

I don't know who actually made it, but I'd happily buy their batteries again...

[polygonum]

Certainly seems feasible and something like that had passed my mind. It was the peculiar delay before sudden failure, followed by seeming to recover to be fairly OK, then utter failure.

[Windmill]

You get the feeling that if it was really important, that if a Mars Rover depended on it, that every battery would be that good. But instead it's whatever the market will bear. The ugly face of two-faced Capitalism. Janusism. (Wasn't Janus a two-faced Roman god? ISTR the name cropping up in an SF story).

[polygonum]

Or even the world fleet of Dreamliners? :-)

What hacks me off about so many things is the lack of any specifications. We see brands x, y and z in a shop and have no idea that x will last twice as long as y or z because of some feature. So we buy the cheaper x. Then makers of y and z see they can make their products cheaper... Race to the bottom.

Even if it displays an impressive list of standards, almost none of us know what they mean.

And if they do start telling us their battery lasts twice as long, we often don't believe them because it's all marketing lies.

Even something as simple as washing-up liquid. When there is a special

750 ml for price of 500ml, are we convinced the contents are the same and not watered down? And that is within a single brand. How about "grease cutting factor 5" for top-end, factor 1 for worst watered down crap?

[Windmill]

"25% extra free!" on a packet of muffins or rolls. But is the (unspecified) weight any greater than normal?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Wicks were recently heavily advertising a special offer - on TV and fliers. 20% off. Or may have been 25%. Said it included tiles and flooring. Went to have a look and the prices shown were obviously old - the tickets were dirty. I was told this was already discounted so no further one applied.