Batery Levels

[wildebed]

Despite all sorts of driving styles I  have never manage to completely charge the Battery - as in there's always one block that remains white.

Is this a common experience?. The car is  2014 Luxury with 16000miles on the clock.

[colin79666]

Yes totally normal. This is done to keep the Battery health as good as possible. I have managed to get mine full on a few occasions but only after a very long downhill and the Battery half full the start with. You will also notice it rarely gets empty before the engine kicks in, again to preserve Battery health. 

[Britprius]

Even when the bar graph shows fully charged the Battery is only 80% charged, and when no bars are showing the Battery still has 40% of it's charge left.

Using this small percentage of the batteries capacity increases the number of charge cycles "the number of time the Battery can be charged, and discharged" for NiMh normally  about 1,000 cycles increased to many 10s of thousands of cycles. The shallower the cycle the greater the number of cycles that can be atchieved.

John.

[Herbie]

As the drivers or end users of the cars we don't have access to all of the traction Battery. I can't remember if we get about 60% or about 80% of it's true capacity but as Colin says above, this system allows the Battery to have a long life over many years and many, many charging cycles.

It may help to visualise it as a horizontal bar, divided into three sections, with the two end sections coloured, say, green and the middle section coloured yellow. The whole length of the bar is the true, actual capacity of the whole Battery, but we don't get to use the two green end sections. The yellow coloured section in the middle is 'ours' and the Battery indicator that we can see in the dashboard shows us the state of charge of 'our' Battery, from flat to fully charged - and yes, we can indeed often see that it is fully charged.