What should the battery voltage be

[Lefty665]

There were other threads here in the forums about powerboost jerky driving and transmission shifting. People claimed to have changed the battery and it went away. Wether thats true or not is one thing but I don't have the exact thread URL but did read it here in the forums.


What I am experiencing is, some days the truck drives very smooth no issues. Other days the truck drives very jerky and has hard shifts. Why it drives inconsistently is what I'm trying to figure out. I've never had a vehicle that had inconsistent shifting or drivability. So I thought (and relating to the forms about batteries) perhaps the inconsistent driving was bc of varying voltages in the batteries since powerboosts are possibly very sensitive to the battery. Which according to other threads and research powerboosts are very much sensitive to a varying battery voltage since it drives the electric motor and other modules.

Tks for the reply. Several things:

First, the post by JohnT that the dash voltage display rounds down to whole numbers. Ford has done several things wrong there (I'm resisting getting started on that rant). What it means is that a 12.0 v reading there apparently doesn't mean anything besides less than 13.0 v, or whatever opaque rounding logic they used. At any rate, that is not a valid indicator that low system voltage is causing driveability issues.

Second, running voltage is different than accessory voltage. I encourage you to get a volt meter that shows actual voltage when running. Even a cheap cigarette lighter plug in will work, although it will likely show slightly less than system voltage. My experience, even when showing lower voltage on accessory, that running voltage is never lower than 14v.

Third, the electric motor runs off the high voltage battery (pushing 400v), not the low voltage battery. The chances of getting the dealer to replace the high voltage battery without explicit diagnostics that it is bad are between slim and none.

Sounds like you do have real issues, it just seems unlikely they are due to low 12v battery voltage. Going to the dealer with the conclusion that a bad 12v battery is the cause of your dirveability issues is very likely to accomplish anything more than to frustrate you both.

There's some folks around here (not me) who are really very knowledgeable about PB driving issues. A more detailed description of what you are experiencing will likely get you witting responses. Those may provide you with specific issues to highlight to the dealer.

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[Lefty665]

That's amazing.
It's hard to fathom that car people working for a car manufacturer would have meetings regarding what features/information should they design and provide to the customer on the instrument cluster, and then NOT be concerned about the actual value of that information being more than fiction.

Fake gauges have been around a long time, of course. But fake digital values with a fake decimal point?

Embarrassing

Yeah, for all the things that Ford has done right with the PB there are a few that are brain dead. Several are in the dashboard display. Maybe that's why they call it an instrument "cluster"?

Maybe it's because for years we bitched about what they gave us, referring to them as "idiot lights". Ford gave us the equivalent with "idiot gauges". The idiots want gauges, we'll give them gauges. Now that's migrated to data too. The idiots want data, we'll give them "idiot data". Us end users would not do anything useful with real information 99 percent of the time anyway.

After you figured out that the oil pressure gauge was a constructed value I replaced it on the dash with the boost gauge. But now I've got no confidence that, or any of the other gauges for that matter, are providing actual measurements. I do tend to believe the speedometer, although it shows funky numbers when slowing to a stop. I also believe, perhaps foolishly, I can tell I'm in electric mode when there are numbers on the speedo and the tach is blank. What are the chances our PBs are really just portals into the Matrix?

What would you think as a young programmer at Ford being assigned to ginning up fake gauge readings and values from real data? Talk about breeding cynicism at a young age. May be the perfect job for artificial intelligence, making up artificial data.

 

[Snakebitten]

There's Ford's customer instrument panel.
Then there's the Powerboost Nerd PID cluster.

 

[Lefty665]

There's Ford's customer instrument panel.
Then there's the Powerboost Nerd PID cluster.

Yeah, that puts an even finer point on your observation that it is embarrassing that Ford has chosen to provide idiot gauges and idiot data with constructed values. They have worked hard to create made up gauges and data when they have actual data in real time that it would have been easier to report. WTFF?

I am still in awe of all the competent to wonderful software in our PBs. It is amazing. That makes the idiot user dashboard interface even less understandable and perhaps disrespectful of us end users.

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