On Mon, 21 Nov 2005, NJ Vike quoted from Car & Driver:
Hybrid Lovers Read This and Lament 3191Hold on there Daniel! The battery industry is well able to come up with aftermarket replacement batteries for these cars. They aren't doing so now because there's...
No. My officemate has an '03 Honda Civic hybrid. It started giving problems on his way from Montreal to Toronto. The Integrated Motor buttist system went offline, which also meant the SLI battery (Starting, Lighting, Ignition -- the conventional 12v item under the hood) was not being charged. When he limped into the parking lot, his SLI battery read 9.9v.
Towed to the dealer, who after three days gave the diagnostic report: The traction battery's dead. Good thing the battery warranty is 6 years, otherwise it'd be a C$8,000+ event. Dealer claims this is the first-ever failure of a traction battery in a Honda hybrid of any year or model, anywhere in the world (Sure, right...) and that a new traction battery has to be brought in from Japan, which will take AT LEAST three weeks.
Of course, there are multiple different issues going on here. There's the car problem itself, then there's the dealer's fairy tales. I can think of half a dozen courier companies that'll happily get a package from Japan to North America in a matter of a couple of days, so that shoots the "three weeks to come from Japan" theory all to hell. And if this were indeed the very first-ever instance of this heretofore unheard-of failure in one of Honda's high-profile, high-PR-value enviro models, one would think the company would be falling all over itself to make the repair as quickly as possible to keep the customer as quiet as possible about it.
Pah. What resale value? This kind of traction battery failure does NOT bode well for the durability of these cars. Sure, it's covered under his battery warranty. The new replacement battery does not reset the battery warranty clock. What about in 5 years? They are disposable cars. 10 years *tops*. More like "end of warranty plus time to next failure".
NiMH batteries are indeed hair-raisingly toxic and expensive to reclaim-recycle. Once no longer in the dealer chain, they will simply get tossed -- along with the rest of the car.
DS
