Acid Lead Battery impacts inside Connected Vehicles

The paper presents a trend of vehicles connected to the internet, adding connected features related to the customers and its impact inside vehicle lead-acid battery health. Lead acid battery work in internal combustion engine context as the power source to crank vehicle and allow usage of vehicle electrical features with engine off, as example: use the infotainment system with engine off. It’s not rare to observe field issues, characterized as dead battery, that customer cannot crank the vehicle, causing dissatisfaction, few cases caused by some loads kept on with engine off. This paper intent to navigate through 3 macro phases and a conclusion: First phase shows concept of battery State of Charge (SOC), define a management of key-off load (KOL) current consumption and explain battery drain calculation with main objective to align key background knowledge to understand next phases; Second phase focus on modeling a hypothetic not connected vehicle in regarding of battery design including battery size definition, expected battery performance versus vehicle KOL and baseline KOL. Third phase evaluates the growing curve of connected features versus battery demand, making few possible scenarios comparison of battery performance impact through connected features deployment in the vehicle. The summary of expected impact completes the conclusion in this paper forecasting a battery deterioration caused by connected features. Also, it’s included few potential next steps to mitigate impacts.