ME_Andy's fleet
 

Figured it's time to start my own thread.

The Leaf we got used for a song just got its first serious mod... A ceramic tint, since temps are getting higher and higher. I figure the $300 will pay for itself eventually, in battery protection. They say it rejects 73%of solar energy.

The Cruze is at 42,000 miles and still driving like new. In fact, an Estonian asked me if it is an electric because it's apparently much quieter than the jalopies he's used to. Its mod are:
Spare delete
42psi
Partial grill block
Underbody shield

Eventually I'll put in a lithium battery of some type. I'm also interested in LED headlights and long oil change intervals. An interesting observation... I haven't rotated the tires in about 12k miles, and I noticed the rears are wearing faster. I'm hoping these original tires last 60k.

It's not hard to improve the Cruze LS splash shield with parts from the higher trims.
http://www.cruzetalk.com/forum/attac...7&d=1417394425
http://www.cruzetalk.com/forum/attac...5&d=1417394461

http://www.cruzetalk.com/forum/27-fu...s/10571?page=1

Two of the Leaf's wheel covers were rattling because the plastic tabs were worn down. So I painted some JB Weld on. Yep, I used spaghetti. (Apologies for the low-res image -- the forum max is only 100-some kB.)

Attachment 21908

I have a used oil analysis coming soon... Looking forward to the results of a 6500 mile Castrol Magnatec run in the Cruze.

Never seen a bad oil analysis from Castrol Magnatec, and here's another sample from my car in its favor. Next up is a 12,000-mile run with Mobil 1 Extended Protection. If wear results are anywhere near as good as those with Magnatec, I'll stick with the Mobil 1 EP because once/year changes are so darn convenient.

At bobistheoilguy.com, they say 1 ppm iron per thousand miles is the gold standard -- this came in at 0.7 ppm iron/thousand miles.
Attachment 21941

I finally got the results from a longer run with Mobil 1 EP 5W-30. I did change the filter at 6000 miles but didn't need to add any more oil. Results were very good but not quite as good as the Magnatec on a shorter run. Plus, my mpg seemed to be dropping considerably towards the end. I think I'll stick with Magnatec and ~8000 miles.https://image.ibb.co/cLwQjn/Screensh...8_204412_2.png

The Leaf is doing great. All battery bars remain at 31,000 miles but we had to replace the lead-acid accessory battery. I've also become aware that I should change the brake fluid soon.

Bought a LiFePO4 battery
 

My Cruze lead-acid battery is about to be 5 years old so I'm pulling the trigger on a Christmas present for myself. Bioenno Power 12V, 500 CCA, 20-30 Ah "lead acid equivalent." 4.4 pound weight. The website says it can handle a brief spike to 625 CCA. I'll put a supercapacitor in parallel, if I have to...

https://www.bioennopower.com/collections/480-to-500-cca

With the BLACKFRIDAY promo code, it's 15% off, so my total cost will be $216. That's about the same as a high-end lead-acid battery, anyway. I'm very excited.

I'm currently googling whether I can charge this battery up with a power supply or if I should spend the extra $15 for a charger. I guess I can charge it with a power supply.

In other car news, I had to replace the Cruze thermostat and the Leaf accessory battery, but other than that, the cars have needed 0 repairs. :)

Here's a good web resource for how to charge a LiFePO4 cell. https://www.powerstream.com/LLLF.htm

It looks like there are 4 cells in series. It's recommended to switch to "constant voltage" charging at 3.65V volts per cell. But to reach the ~13V of a car battery, I will never get into the "constant voltage" charging zone. So I guess I will slowly crank up the charging voltage until I hit whatever final voltage matches the lead-acid battery it's replacing. Unless one of you wise people advises otherwise ;)

That's what intuition would have had me do, anyway.

The LiFePO4 battery is in! And it starts the car just fine. I wedged it in with some foam blocks and sprayed some anti-corrosion stuff on the terminals.

It took some creativity to make the connections, though. The battery terminals are a lot smaller than the original. I should properly re-terminate the cables one of these days.

I think this is a no-brainer mod when a battery needs replacement because the LiFePO4 should last 2x longer than lead-acid.

The Leaf lost its first battery bar at ~4.5 years old and 39,500 miles. But, we still get a range of 85-90 miles due to efficient driving. That's a pretty good run for a car that spent its life in the heat of Georgia and Texas, I think. The garage will often be 110*+ in the summer.

It was rarely fast-charged which helped a lot, I think. My wife didn't notice the missing bar yet and I'm not planning to spoil her excellent opinion of the car.

A bungie for the battery
 

I bought a flat bungee cord to hold the battery down. It works pretty well and the length is adjustable from, like, 6" to ridiculously long. This is the exact one I bought:

https://www.amazon.com/Reese-Secure-...+secure+bungee

There wasn't a great place to clip the bungee so I drilled 2 tiny holes and looped a zip tie through it. The bungee hooks on there great.

Bungee cord for your battery?
Could you use the old brackets and maybe put something harder under the new battery?

Brake pad change
 

Changed the Cruze's brake pads today. At 72k miles they still had plenty of life left. Should have left them longer.

All of our future cars will be ev's, so it's weird to think I might never change brake pads again.

This is a semi towing a Chevy Spark... And nothing else.

My goal is complete, I have the least valuable vehicle on my street. I thought the old man across the way would be stiffer competition, but he traded his old F150 for a new Explorer.

Whew, used Volts are getting cheap! Here's a 2014 with 60k for $8000. I might be interested in selling our Leaf for $10k and buying this instead.

https://austin.craigslist.org/ctd/d/...124983523.html

I've been driving the Leaf a lot more since the pandemic started. One thing I've really come to appreciate is the alien shift knob. It's really a lot nicer than the gear shift levers on other cars, probably because it doesn't require a mechanical connection to anything.

The Cruze has gone so unused that wasps started building a nest on the engine cover.

I would rather sell the Cruze, but I think it's not even worth $4k now.

The LiFePO4 starter battery experiment is over. There was dead silence when I tried to start it this morning and lots of dash warnings. Voltage was down to 3.5V. :/ So I'm back to lead acid.

Some reasons why the LiFePO4 might have died early are it was a little undersized and there were a couple mornings when I ran it near freezing temp. LiFePO4 doesn't like that.

The LiFePO4 was 20-30 Ah, OEM was 50-ish. Perhaps I was a little too cheap, I'm not sure. Then again, if it was the cold that killed it, I'm glad I didn't spend more.

Some excitement in the Leaf-- we got back from a week-long trip and hopped in the car. It was parked facing uphill slightly. Wife puts it in reverse. When she hit the brakes to slow down, nothing happened. After rolling backwards uncontrolled for 8 feet or so, she panic-slammed the pedal to the floor and finally the brakes engaged and we stopped.

Apparently the 12V accessory battery dies if you leave it without charging for a week or so. And it runs the brakes. That's .. kind of a big design flaw.

It's all charged up and good to go again now, I think.

The funny part was taking it to O'Reilly's to get the battery checked.

"Ok, it's time to check your starter."
"It doesn't have a starter."
"Oh. Then let's check the alternator."
"It doesn't have an alternator."
"Oh. I have no idea how electric cars work."

That's like giving you droid army a single point of failure. :confused:

But it sounds like it was worth it for the conversation at the parts counter.

Best mod I've ever done was Odyssey Extreme sealed AGM batteries. After killing walmart batteries every year I've yet to kill an odyssey (going about 8 years now on my first). In my head I think it saves you the most money over time. Toyota oem/oem replacement batteries are very good too but usually more expensive. The battery in the 2010 Prius is the original and it still reads 12.5V resting. 12 years is not bad.

I changed the spark plugs in the Cruze today. That was fun and easy. I think the old plugs looked good but maybe a bit on the lean side. I'm sure they could have gone an extra 20k miles or so. The electrode looked almost new but with a coating of ash. The timing belt is coming up next.

I screwed one thing up. Apparently you're not supposed to gap these plugs or it can scrape off some coating and they won't last as long. Oh well, I don't need to keep the car much longer. Another few years, I guess.

Speaking of changing vehicles, I want an electric truck but I don't want to spend $60k. I was watching some videos of Ben Nelson's lithium Ranger conversion and that seems like the easiest path forward. I'll have to keep my eyes open for an EV Ranger for sale. They're rare these days. The timeline to begin this project is about a year or so.

It took $20k to convert my '88 ranger to volt battery power 8 years ago but only a weekend to swap. Should be bit cheaper today since there are more options and I bought only new cutting edge for the time. Up side is that it is basically just an engine swap with a cologne bell housing

Ford made only about 50k E rangers so they are really rare and it's almost the same work to change chemistry on the battery as it is to convert .

That's good to hear! Did you get the parts from EVWest? Got any details or a thread on here I could read?

Never was a fan of EVwest, could buy the listed items for 1/3 less and half the delivery time.

Was such a fast swap, didn't have time to document and I figured most people didn't care about shopping for parts on the internet.

We got a nasty surprise on the Leaf. The electric brake actuator died and it will be $3700+tax to replace. Ouch. I have to say, the Chevy Cruze is aging much better than the Nissan Leaf.

We'll probably trade the Leaf for a Bolt in the next few months.

Ouch! Please don't tell me that's true! Car parts just keep getting more expensive and seemingly less reliable!

Just out of curiosity and not knowing of a more tactful way of asking this, but did you do the yearly or bi-yearly brake fluid changes like it says in the manual and this still happened?

I changed the brake fluid once only, in 7 years. I guess that's not amazing.

There's also a voluntary firmware update recall (P5327) that might have fixed it but the Nissan dealership refused to apply it retroactively. WTF

Brakes have some well-known issues on these vehicles. The door handles are also starting to die. Never another Nissan for me.

I don't think the brake fluid would have helped, though. What we experienced was an electrical communication failure, not anything mechanical.

Ya, we had a similar experience with our Nissan Leaf and Nissan. I'm also never getting another Nissan ever again.

I did the first oil change on my Cruze in 17 months. Not bad! The oil life monitor said I could have waited a few more months, but I'll err slightly on the side of caution.

My old standby oil, Castrol Magnatec, went through a rebranding. It also got more expensive and oil in general is getting harder to find. Seems like the overall oil selection has dropped a lot.

I don't really trust Castrol after the rebranding. Is it still the same stuff that tested well for me in the past, or not?

So I went with Valvoline full syn for $27 at Walmart. I'm sure it's fine.

The Cruze now has 92k miles and I've still only ever needed to replace a thermostat. :)

We bought a Bolt! It's a massive upgrade from the Leaf. Having 250 miles of range compared to 80 miles is a big deal for my wife, and we'll be using it for more roadtrips. Never could do that with the Leaf.

My favorite feature so far is the regen lever on the steering wheel. Regen is powerful in this vehicle.

A nice side benefit of the Bolt is, my wife can charge for free at work. Because the range is longer, she doesn't need to charge at home ever, really, unless we go on a roadtrip. We also aren't constantly topping the battery up at 100% so it should last a LOT longer. 8 year, 100k mile warranty.

If anybody is in the Austin TX area and wants a 2015 Leaf for $11k, message me. :)

Congrats on the Bolt!

I would consider a Bolt if I were in the market for another car.

Thanks IZ!

We took care of some of the basic things that will help us appreciate the vehicle for a long, long time, hopefully:

- Window tint (also helps with efficiency)
- Seat covers
- Steering wheel cover

The underbody isn't as flat as I expected, but realistically I'm not going to change it any time soon.

The Bolt is awesome. I'm still happy to drive it, every single chance I get.

When I saw that the Silverado EV will get 450 miles of range, I put a reservation in. Wonder how many reservations they have already and how long it will take?

Bought a $70 adapter so we can charge our Bolt at 240V. I didn't realize until recently, you don't actually need a dedicated charger unit. Thanks aerostealth for the video on that. Here's the adapter:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/153731040798

'adapters'
 

Did you happen to catch Aerostealth's 'combiner'?
Plugging cords into a 120V outlet from circuits coming from each 120 VAC bus inside the breaker panel creates a 240v source for the charger, if the home or apartment lacks a 240v receptacle.
Another 'tool' for opportunity charging.;)

I didn't see the "combiner" video but that's a cool idea, could save people some $$. Luckily I don't need it because my garage already has 240V.

Oil change at 98k miles, Valvoline full syn
 

Just recording another oil change. This one was at a 16 month, 6000 mile interval. Oil Life Monitor said I had 35% left. Don't drive much, these days.

Went with Valvoline Full Syn just because I had a stash in the garage.

The itch to buy a truck is strong so I started saving for a Maverick. Maybe this was my last Cruze oil change. I really appreciate the easy access GM designed.

If I do make another oil change, it will probably be Costco (Kirkland) full syn. It's only $4/quart and from a UOA I saw online, the wear rate is comparable to Mobil 1.

Also did a timing belt change in January. That was a challenge.