I was very impressed with the starting battery that came standard in a
2006 RAV4.
In 2010 I gave the vehicle to one of my granddaughters. The vehicle had been in the family since it was purchased new. The battery was made by Panasonic and it lasted over 10 years, just needing to be replaced a few days ago.
Yes, we live in a temperate part of the nation, doesn't get very hot, doesn't get very cold and very moderate humidity all year long.
I replaced the battery with one made by Interstate and sold by Costco. Toyota wanted $400 for an OEM battery. I was a little surprised the new battery from Costco cost $90, which seemed steep, but I am a skinflint.
Does anyone have first hand experience with the Costco Interstate batteries? It came with a 42 month, non-prorated, full replacement warranty, which seems reasonable.
I too will be interested to see the comments. I'm at this moment waiting for AAA to come give me a jump start so I can go get my battery replaced. If I am reliably informed, I'll be getting an Interstate.
Our usual MO would be to go to the auto parts store and do it ourselves, but my husband is out of town on business.
I guess the last week or two of frigid weather killed my battery, although I'm grateful it waited until it warmed up a bit before giving up the ghost. At least I'm stranded at home.
Many auto parts chain stores will pop it in there it for you for free, especially if you present a Helpless Housewife persona. If you're a real babe, that'll usually work too.
I might be able to give you some insight as I was in the industrial battery business for 38 years. Though and industrial battery can weight as much as 4000# the lead acid technology is similar to that of a car battery.
If a battery is not used much but never allowed to deeply discharge it can last for a very long time. For an automotive battery, ten years is way above average, but batteries today can easily last twice as long as they did 40 years ago.
There are several modes of failure.
Plates can fall off, separators may become dislodged and plates can short out or become bridged by shed material. An intra-cell connection can break. Such things are outright failures.
Assuming nothing fails outright, the ultimate end of life is when all the active material is shed from the plates. Active material is that which takes place in the chemical reaction is is eventually all left as sediment at the bottom of the cell.
If all goes well, as the active material is shed, new material is exposed and the battery should keep at teals 80% of it's designed capacity through it's useful life. Once the active material is shed, the battery's capacity will drop rapidly and generally levels out around 33%.
One very good indicator of how long a car battery lasts is the actual size of the plates. Though two different batteries may be the same physical size, inexpensive batteries will generally have much smaller plates. In a warm weather location such as Florida. such a battery may be perfectly adequate, but where I live in Wisconsin one would want the maximum plate size possible.
Getting to the point a very good indicator of how good of a battery you have is simply , how much does it weight?
If your new battery is as heavy as the old one, you should expect good life from it. Not necessarily ten years, but six is common. If it does not weight very much not only would I expect shorted life, I would expect that it would not have the capacity to start a car in very cold weather.
As to the brand of the battery, I am not that familiar with automotive, but have used gel-cells and the Japanese batteries are quite good.
BTW: The price you paid of $90 is fairly typical and I would not spend $400 for an OEM either
I've used Interstate in a couple of cars and we have them in a couple of forklift trucks at work. No problems with them. These days, 43 month warranty is pretty good.
Interstate dealers will install them for free too. Some places would not do it as the battery was under the back seat. I don't know about Costco.
Costco does not install the batteries. I checked with the local Interstate dealer and he quoted me $140 for the same battery Costco sold me for $90, he advised me to get it from Costco. I was impressed with his integrity.
Ok...... When I changed the battery I told her she would have to reprogram her radio stations, but, low and behold, the radio must have decent capacitors because she didn't lose any settings. Probably didn't take more than 30 seconds between pulling the old battery and dropping the new one in place.
I really liked that Toyota put an insulating sleeve around the battery.
You might want to look into portable jump starters like these:
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You can keep them in your trunk or glove box and easily jump start your own car. No need for jumper cables or another vehicle.
I was skeptical when I first bought mine, but it has rescued me more than once already. I bought a couple for my wife and daughter this year for Christmas.
I don't know anything about Costco, but I have had good experiences with Interstate batteries.
I DO NOT recommend the Duralast batteries sold at Autozone. I was buying them for our cars for a while, and every one of them failed within a year. Half of the replacements failed within a year too. Never again.
We used to buy generic batteries at the local department stores with 5 or
7 year warranties. They always outlasted the warranties, but unfortunately the local stores stopped carrying batteries (that's when we tried the Duralast batteries). Sadly, car batteries don't have the warranties they used to.
Batteries always seem to fail at the worst times. They never die on a bright sunny Saturday morning when you feel rested and the birds are singing. They fail on a dark winter day, when it's 30 degrees, the snow is flying, and you're already late for work. :)
These days I work from home and don't drive my car much. So my battery tends to go dead every few months from sitting unused. I end up having to put it on the charger every few months.
Radio stations is minor and it was probably a more basic car. Some cars lose window stops, seat positions etc. According to Buick, I would have had to enter an anti-theft code for the radio for it to function again.
I never buy vehicles with those kinds of bells and whistles. Like I said, I am skinflint, a car is something that gets me from point A to point B. Gadgets are just more things to go wrong, which is probably why I like our draft horses so much.
I'm a gray-haired old lady. They charged me $15 for the install. I should find out what kind of premium I paid for the battery itself. I see that my previous battery cost $99 in 2012, and this one was $124 in 2016, so maybe a bit over what I'd have paid at the parts store.
A friend bought the cheapest battery for his old ford pickup, trying to save money. The engine was a 400 something and the new battery would barely start the engine after many tries. He was ready to sell the truck because it had problems starting until I explained to him that a large motor like that needs a lot of cold cranking amps. He had never heard of cold cranking amps, but admitted the battery salesman tried to sell him a better battery, but he refused to spend more money on an old truck.
In the end he got a better battery, with more cold cranking amps, which solved all his problems.
I don't know if most people realize that a battery needs to be matched to the size of the engine. The bigger the engine, the more cold cranking amps required to start it.
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