Battery ran low and extended range didn't kick in!

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Guitarzan

New member
Joined
Jun 6, 2015
Messages
2
Last Friday my battery ran down and instead of the gas kicking in seamlessly as it has in the past the car started to react as if it was running out of gas. I went from 70 to 30 in less than 30 seconds on the freeway in the carpool lane. I heard a click sound and the gas kicked in and I was on my way. I got home and charged up and took my car into the dealer on Monday. They had the car all week and of course did not get the car to repeat the action. However, they were told to install something by BMW and I got my car back today.

Has anyone else had this issue?
Thank you for any help you can give anyone
 
Yikes, that's a little scary. :eek:

Have you been coding your car? Not to place the blame on you in any way, just curious about what the reasons could possibly be.
 
How long had the gasoline been sitting in the tank? HOw often do you get into that situation where you use the REx? When was the last maintenance run of the car (I hear that is triggered about every 6-weeks if you don't use it prior)? It may not have fired up on the first try. Also realize that at 70mph, depending on the road, the REx may not be able to keep up, and the battery level can continue to drop.
 
I have owned my car since December so please be patient with me.

1) What is coding?
2) The gas had probably been in the tank 4-5 days. I have to use the extended range weekly (maybe once). I live in Los Angeles and on the days I drive to work I have to use the freeway and never have had an issue with the speed and the battery running low and the REx taking over.
As far as maintenance I bought it in December and in January before I even made the first payment it was recalled for the battery and BMW had it for 3 days. In March they had it for 1 day because the engine light came on (which I now know was my fault for not turning the gas cap over till it clicked). The car is now not scheduled for regular maintenance until August which I confirmed again on Friday when I picked up my car.
 
The onus of my questions was to see if the gasoline was old...in your case, that is not true. If you do not need to run the REx, the car will automatically turn it on about once every 6-weeks or so (the exact timing is probably in the manual, but I've not looked as I have a BEV). Some people buy the REx, then almost never use it for many months in between. In that case, the car turns it on once the timer has expired and the SOC is below 75% so there's room for the extra charging to go into the batteries. If you ran into the performance degradation, it sounds like the REx did not successfully turn on at the nominal 6%. If you were going at a high rate of speed and up a longer grade at the moment, the SOC may have dropped faster than the sample rate of the condition...this is just a guess. Or, it tried to start, and for some reason, couldn't on the first try. There may be logic in there that it has to wait a bit for the fuel to evaporate in the cylinders before it can retry, if it failed. May be the 'perfect storm' situation. Won't know without further testing.
 
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