What bad can happen if a Lightning sits for 6 months.

[chl]

It should be stored at around 50% charge, not 100% even though 100 is actually around 90. Storing the lithium batteries at high state of charge isn't good for them.

The owners manual actually states the procedure for long term storage, whoever did this didn't read it.

That being said, how much damage it really did is hard to say. Plus you've got an 8 year 100k mile warranty but from the sounds of it most people here aren't going to keep theirs anywhere near that long.

Agreed about the Li battery.
Maybe require a battery health check to be safe before buying.
If this is a dealership, require battery repair if there are any damaged cells detected.

I wonder if the warranty makes exceptions for improper storage which this was?

Another point for anyone storing an EV long-term. Maybe this isn't a problem with the Lightning, but it was with my Nissan Leaf: the 12v battery may fully discharge running all the vampire current drains, charging timer, FOB, etc.

I keep my 12v battery on a battery tender trickle charger in the Leaf so it won't go dead when sitting more than a few weeks if I am traveling.

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[Bwanapete]

My 2022 mannequin sat for 6 months. When I took delivery in late December it showed 85% charge. It had 111 miles, and when I first saw it the previous July it had 85 miles. Was mostly stored in the showroom. No battery problems.

 

[Roy2001]

I used to do that and got the same result. But I discovered in laptops with removable batteries, you can run the laptop on AC without the battery (you lose the effective UPS functionality, but I hooked mine up to a real UPS). I put the battery in a refrigerator door compartment at about 50% charge, loosely wrapped inside a Ziploc bag (not sealed) at about 45 deg F on the door at ~50% charge, took it out ~every 6 months, let it warm up to room temperature before unrolling the bag, and topped it off to ~50% again. Next to no capacity loss for years kept that way, and the battery worked fine when I traveled. Unfortunately, these days most laptops do not have removable batteries. IIRC, with HP and Lenovo laptops, one can set the maximum state of charge desired. So you could run it a max of 50% SOC. The old laptops both charged the battery to 100% on AC and cooked the battery from processor heat at the same time!

Man, battery is not a baby

Nowadays Lenovo and Dell have apps to limit the charge. If I need to use laptop without PSU I would set battery charge limit to 85%, otherwise I would set charge limit to 55%sine I use laptop as a desktop.

For truck, 20-80% for daily usage is perfectly fine.

 

[PungoteagueDave]

100% for long time would hurt capacity. The ER battery is 143kWh with 131kWh usable, but most of 12kWh should be used as low SOC. You'd better have technician check the capacity.

Many years ago I had a laptop that was always on charger used as a desktop. After 2 years the battery was dead, cannot hold any charge at all.

100% long time is next to 0%, 0% for short periods would hurt battery badly.

Technically incorrect. Ford's head of integration engineering visited my home (along with reps from SunRun) to work on issues around the bi-directional charging system (still inop). I asked and they confirmed that the HV battery is not able to "reserve" upper or lower portions - a battery is like a gas tank - when 90% full, it is 10% empty, not in any particular location. Storing at "full" which we know is really 91.6% of capacity is just that and as simple as it appears - and will not damage the battery or affect its life. My Lightning has been sitting now for two months unused and will remain so until mid-July. The Lightning has remarkably low vampire losses compared to my prior Teslas and the high reported daily draw on the Rivian battery. I have lost contact with the truck (I'm currently bicycling in Hungary), but it had lost very little in the first three weeks before entering deep sleep mode. These things are way less fragile than folks think. My Tesla P85D began with 256 miles range in 2014, still had 245 miles range at 125k miles when traded in 2019.

 

[PungoteagueDave]

I used to do that and got the same result. But I discovered in laptops with removable batteries, you can run the laptop on AC without the battery (you lose the effective UPS functionality, but I hooked mine up to a real UPS). I put the battery in a refrigerator door compartment at about 50% charge, loosely wrapped inside a Ziploc bag (not sealed) at about 45 deg F on the door at ~50% charge, took it out ~every 6 months, let it warm up to room temperature before unrolling the bag, and topped it off to ~50% again. Next to no capacity loss for years kept that way, and the battery worked fine when I traveled. Unfortunately, these days most laptops do not have removable batteries. IIRC, with HP and Lenovo laptops, one can set the maximum state of charge desired. So you could run it a max of 50% SOC. The old laptops both charged the battery to 100% on AC and cooked the battery from processor heat at the same time!

that's plain insane. You are serving things rather than having things serve you. Run them like rented mules, replace when degraded. So much wasted time/effort when all we have in life is a limited number of heartbeats.

 

[RickLightning]

My demo sat for longer.

 

[MickeyAO]

Technically incorrect. Ford's head of integration engineering visited my home (along with reps from SunRun) to work on issues around the bi-directional charging system (still inop). I asked and they confirmed that the HV battery is not able to "reserve" upper or lower portions - a battery is like a gas tank - when 90% full, it is 10% empty, not in any particular location. Storing at "full" which we know is really 91.6% of capacity is just that and as simple as it appears - and will not damage the battery or affect its life. My Lightning has been sitting now for two months unused and will remain so until mid-July. The Lightning has remarkably low vampire losses compared to my prior Teslas and the high reported daily draw on the Rivian battery. I have lost contact with the truck (I'm currently bicycling in Hungary), but it had lost very little in the first three weeks before entering deep sleep mode. These things are way less fragile than folks think. My Tesla P85D began with 256 miles range in 2014, still had 245 miles range at 125k miles when traded in 2019.

I think most, if not all, battery experts will disagree with you...and the ones that DO agree with you are demonstrating that they do not know what they are talking about. Charge SOC is not a fluid level where I can simply use a dip stick, but is based on voltage. If I want to reserve the top 5% SOC AND the bottom 5% SOC, I will base it on voltage, not fluid level.

Beware of high level engineers who never worked on batteries. Otherwise, ask them what dip stick they use to measure SOC

 

[Jim Lewis]

So much wasted time/effort when all we have in life is a limited number of heartbeats.

You might be right. So much time might be saved, the better to spend on online forums!

Actually, on compelling (or compulsive?) things to do, I was listening to a podcast the other day where the Universal Paperclips game came up as an example: "You'd better be careful of what you ask for with AI, as you might get it in spades." Reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven.

But if I understand the game designer correctly, he created the game to illustrate toying with human compulsions. That we can get hooked into doing something that's actually pretty meaningless. He's a professor of computer science at NYU and invented the Universal Paperclips game, the podcasters commented, to illustrate his theory on that to his students in a course on game theory. The Wikipedia comments on the psychology of the game are entertaining: Universal Paperclips - Wikipedia

One might say so much of life is another form of Universal Paperclips...

Free read if you haven't read other New Yorker magazine articles: The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips | The New Yorker

 

[PungoteagueDave]

I think most, if not all, battery experts will disagree with you...and the ones that DO agree with you are demonstrating that they do not know what they are talking about. Charge SOC is not a fluid level where I can simply use a dip stick, but is based on voltage. If I want to reserve the top 5% SOC AND the bottom 5% SOC, I will base it on voltage, not fluid level.

Beware of high level engineers who never worked on batteries. Otherwise, ask them what dip stick they use to measure SOC

It ain’t fluid level. It is power in, power out. Both inputs and outputs are simply akin to filling or draining a tank with respect to batteries. I knew that but one of Ford’s top engineering managers confirmed it, standing in my garage.

 

[Coolbreeze704]

You could find that rats took up residence in the car and ate your engine harness. Then wind up with 35k in repairs that your hope are covered by insurance (State Farm did for my Porsche) … and wait months while they manufacture new parts. Make sure its inside and you have no critters

Just open the Lightning door slowly when you get back to it in July!

 

[RickLightning]

that's plain insane. You are serving things rather than having things serve you. Run them like rented mules, replace when degraded. So much wasted time/effort when all we have in life is a limited number of heartbeats.

I thought Ford was buying yours back?

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