Power starter

For the second time now since I have bought the electric car the 12V Battery was suddenly empty. On a Sunday morning. Without a warning. When we were about to leave for a walk in the forest.

You should think that the main battery is the one you really should care about, but that battery is just working. The little bastard in the front is the one making the problems.

When this happened for the first time, I bought a Jump-Starter. I still could call the Nissan Service to send a car that Jump-starts my one, but I figured that would be faster. That jump-starter was lying around for a year now and I have already put it on the bad-investment side, when this Sunday happened.

Boy, was I glad I knew where that starter was. It started the car almost right away and we drove around for re-charging the 12V annoyance call itself a battery. For the rest of the day the car worked fine.

Coming home after some hours in the woods, the cars decided not to charge anymore. Nothing I could do about that. On a Sunday. So I called the repair-shop Automobil-Kompaniet next Morning and got a vacant spot the day after. I was already quite happy with them when they did the Service earlier that year.

In the meantime I figured it would be wise to charge the small battery full and got a charger for that. It made it quite clear that there was not much juice left in the box. Even without charging the main battery full I still got enough driving distance to make it to the shop.

I got there early, but I still took two hours of waiting until they could hand the car back to me.The explanation of the error: unknown, but when I mentioned the Super-charger-jump-charger I got a decent hint that maybe this wasn’t a so good idea to use a cheap jump-starter on an electric car.

Those (cheap) starters tend to try to use a much power as they possible can and fire that into the 12V battery. According to the repair-shop, this might trigger an overflow into the main-battery and somehow this could have resulted in the error they saw in the car. The charging functionality was disabled by this pending error message. Once it was cleared, they said they could charge again.

Somehow this would now have been covered by the warranty ( a point which I would have argued about), but they put under the category Service anyway, so: free-of-charge. Lucky me.

So: no cheap power-starters on my car and the 12V charger for the battery instead.