Car batteries are bought often to replace batteries you already had in a car. When you buy a new car the battery was chosen by the manufacturer to match the expected usage & electronics systems requirements.
Often when we replace a battery we specify to the vendor of the replacement battery we need what car we have by make, model & year. That is so that they can match the capabilities of the battery we had – the ratings for how much power the battery can produce to turn the engine over to start the car. The location we live can dictate some characteristics of the battery we buy as well – usually that revolves around how cold it is outside when we start our car at the coldest part of the year.
When we need to replace the cars battery we often don’t think about what we could’ve done to get more life out of our battery but that is the subject of this article.
Sometimes when we replace a battery it may still be “under warranty”. That usually means batteries are also rated & guaranteed by how long they should last us. The cost of a replacement battery is sometimes prorated based on how much life we got out of a particular battery.
The question then is what could we have done differently to improve the life of our battery. How much longer could we have gone before we really needed to replace that battery?
The root answer to that questions is sometimes posed as – what causes a car battery to fail?
In older battery technologies we had to keep fluid in them ourselves. That’s not an issue these days.
Sometimes we consider that a battery failing, or not lasting as long as it is warranted, is because there is a defect in the battery as it was manufactured.
That in fact is not the case, as more battery failures are caused seemingly by bad driving habits than defects in them.
A report for example from a German automobile manufacturer tells us that of 400 car batteries returned & studied, 200 were actually working fine. The problems with them were in two main areas.
Low charge was one issue. In that case the battery had not been charged enough. This can usually be from not running a car long enough on the engine to charge it or faulty car components that don’t allow the engine to charge the battery. This problem is seen more on larger luxury cars that had more powered accessories than other non-luxury models.
Acid stratification was the other main issue in the batteries checked out in this study for luxury cars. This issue isn’t as dominant in non-luxury cars.
Studies in Japan, where the problem is more predominant, reveal that shorter driving distances in congested cities cause the batteries to not charge enough, leading to that starting problem along with sulfation when batteries don’t fully charge.
In North America, we don’t tend to have the problem of short driving distances, because we tend to drive our cars more over longer distances in North America.
The issue of duration of charge for automotive batteries comes around the battery never getting a chance to get to a fully saturated charge. This is what a car battery needs to give a lead acid battery a long life.
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