Does AWD stop working with reduced power output/range?

[logicbroker]

This is the third winter I've had my lightning in the UP of michigan. We get a lot of snow, and I've never had an issue.

I was driving down a driveway that isn't maintained well. I would estimate 4-6 inches deep of snow with icy snow pack bottom. (no sand or salt) Usually the truck just drives fine through that though.

Turning around the rear tires were in slightly deeper snow and I got temporarily stuck. I also barely made i back down the driveway, and barely made it up the ever so slight incline out on to the road. Even when front tires were on asphalt, the rears just spun.

For the first time I enabled the off road rear locking differential, which may have helped a tiny bit but rear kept spinning out still.

I had to do many many attempts rocking back and forth and it probably took 10 minutes to make it out of the driveway.

It only used the rear wheels. I kept spinning out no matter how hard I tried.

It was kind of cold, and didn't have much range. I think the left power output dial gauge was at high 30s or 42 percent max output?

There were no notifications or alerts or errors, other when the limited traction light came on.

Does power stop going to the front in limited range or something?

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[TaxmanHog]

There is a power distribution display on the IPC, take a look at that to confirm that the front motor might not be putting out traction energy.

Usually the limited power to motors on the left side of gauge relates to software controlled limits because of cold conditions and low HVB SOC, not that it's shut down the motor all together, but we have seen such conditions when the truck is throwing a reduced power error code.

 

[mr.Magoo]

That is an interesting observation and one I haven't been able to "document" myself.

I had one episode where an OTA did something and my power output was reduced to 50% or below (don't remember the exact number but it was enough for an "oh, s-it!" moment.

At that time, one of the motors were disabled (could tell from logs that no power was sent to it).

Now, this could obviously be a fluke.

On an interesting note otherwise, just the other day I didn't charge overnight and had to do a lot more driving than I expected so heading home that night I had about 12-15% left and an estimated 30 miles of range left which was plenty for my needs.

I was thinking about cold batteries and regen and how if charging in the cold is bad (which it is) wouldn't regen be as bad and they'd be better off using the heater element as a energy "bleeder" and use regen to heat the battery.

As I was driving home, I kept getting more and more range but my SoC went down still ???

Came home and checked the data, and sure as s-it, the truck sacrificed energy to heat the batteries to ultimately get more energy available, that was pretty freaking cool.

It didn't seem like they're using regen as a direct conversion, but the fact that they accounted for a scenario like taht is pretty impressive IMHO.

 

[logicbroker]

I didn't think to check the power distribution display the other day.

I charged it that night, and the next day drove around and it drove like normal and power distribution seemed normal.

If it happens again I'll check it and I'll report back.

Thank You

 

[potato]

In my experience if it's just a little bit of power reduction, like up to 15%, you have both motors and should have normal traction. If you're seeing 65% or less available, then you probably don't have the front motor and the traction loss will be very noticeable if it's slippery. That's only happened to me one time. Next drive cycle it was fine.

 

[21st Century Truck]

This is actually pretty good news imho... Kudos to the smarts of Ford engineers!

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