Category: ZOE

goingelectric.de user “Urban” had this brilliant solution for the sticky shelf. We’ve published a more permanent solution here  but nonetheless I immediately applied some duct tape 😉

See this post for the sometimes problematic cable locking mechanism.

Today my 2013 Q210 ZOE was at the dealer for it’s 4 year maintenance. I arrived there a tad low on battery so I asked them if they could please hook it up once they were done with it. No problem of course. Just as I arrived to collect it, I saw the chief mechanic getting in (it was already hooked up), so I walked up to him first. He was a tad nervous and said he had updated the charger firmware and now he noticed it wasn’t charging. I walked around only to hear the somewhat familiar cam wheel “whee whee” noise from the locker mechanism, so I joked: “well, luckily my friend, I do know what is wrong. Hooked the thing up again and all was dandy, though now of course I had to wait a bit to make it home.

Chatting along he told me the locking motor was now a new part number and maybe I wanted to replace it (80-ish euro). I decided to go for it. I have had a few early terminated charge sessions, and like the inner flap hinge, sometimes Renault does not always acknowledge a warranty issue, but they do improve the design over time. I’ll report back on this.

These picture Harm took for us “on request” and are all taken from under the car looking up with the cover screen and battery removed.

Dutch ZOE driver and enthusiast Harm Otten was #3 in The Netherlands to have the battery of his Q210 upgraded to the ZE40 type. He was allowed to take pictures of the procedure done only yesterday and I want to thank him and the Arend Auto Eindhoven dealership for sharing them in public.

There are two ways to reset the trip part, which makes the car “forget” driving and battery behavior.

Reset “light” is through R-Link. This will reset the range indicator (GOM) to a value proportionally  related to the capacity of the battery. In effect it forgets how (un)economical you have driven. It was used in the old days to check how healthy the battery was.

There is also a harder reset, called the “two pedal reset”. Keep the driver door open, start the car, keep the gear in N, press and hold both pedals and press up key on the windshield wiper control until the averages message appears in the display. Now hold that button. First it displays the current values, then it starts flashing, then the average values display —. Now let go. This reset seems to also make the battery computer (LBC) loose quite a bit of acquired parameters and the GOM shoots up to a crazy value.

The car will rather quickly re-learn the state of affairs. Just don’t rely on the range indicator on your first trip after a reset.

This post is more for reference. In the R models there is no BCB and no PEB. These functions (power distribution, inverters, motor controller) are all integrated in one huge box called the PEC. Inside are several modules doing the hard work. Here are a few pictures of the PEC,the R240 motor, and the complete assembly.

Zoe’s error messages to the driver are not always crystal clear. This one usually points to a failure in the 12 volt system.

There are basically two reasons why the 12 volt system can be compromised (barring real faults somewhere in the electrical system):

1. failure of the 12 volt lead acid battery
2. unexpected drain of the 12 volt battery (leading very very quickly to 1.)

Let me start by saying the 12 volt system feeds anything and everything that is not traction or the air conditioning compressor. For the non-Nordic version, it also feeds a few rheostats for fast wind shield defrosting. It’s all pretty beefy but still it can drain fast. Remember that all 16 computers are powered from the 12 volt system. If this bus runs bad, literally nothing will work as expected, if at all really.

Renault has the lead-acid battery replacement in their schedule set for after 3 years. This does seem pretty short indeed, but given the above, I wouldn’t dismiss the dealers suggestion for replacement flat out. If you are in doubt, at least have it tested. Lead acid batteries are loosing a notoriously amount of capacity when it gets cold, and you don’t want to get stranded with a full traction battery, but a dead 12 volt system. And if it’s dead, the computers are dead, and there will be no way to bootstrap charging it without hooking it up to an external 12 volt battery charger. Been there, read on.

Unexpected drain is pretty hard to do. The auxiliary power shuts off when the car goes in sleep mode, so even leaving on some sort of accessory through the lighter plug should shut down.

There is one scenario however, which I am pretty sure happened to me. The charger plug was not seated properly, or at least the car thought so. You can actually detect this when the motor lock retries every 2-3 seconds. This retrying continues forever and while this is going on, the car is fully awake, all computers are on, the lock motor is being fired continuously and of course no charging is happening while there is a serious load on the 12 volt system. Now one could think the 12 volt system is being replenished by the traction battery, but it isn’t. The lead acid battery was drained down to 5 volt in a few hours at which point the car went completely dead. 5 volt is devastating to a lead acid battery if not quickly charged. Luckily, I found out and diagnosed this within a few hours of it happening.

I couldn’t bootstrap the car “in situ”, because as soon as I connected my small 12 volt car charger to the battery, the car woke up, started to initialize all it’s systems and while doing so overwhelmed the charger. I removed the mass cable from the battery and charged it for an hour. After that, the battery had enough juice to pull the car through it’s initialisation. I then was able to remove the charger cable, hooked it up again and charged the car normally. The error went away after one cycle.